IMPORTANT NOTE: DO NOT READ THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE ALREADY READ "EYRIE
PRODUCTIONS DESTROYS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE" IN THE SUBTERRANEAN VAULT:

http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Grill/Vault/epdtmu.txt

If you HAVE read EPDTMU, welcome and enjoy.  Notes to follow.

----
	Paige Guthrie was no stranger to bad situations.  She'd been a
student at the Xavier Institute for six years.  Two years before,
she'd followed her brother Sam's lead and graduated to the big
leagues, the Institute's senior team of costumed crimefighters - the
X-Men.  The X-Men spent their lives getting into bad situations, for
the hopeful betterment of the world.
	Sometimes they didn't get back out again.  Paige was
philosophical about that.  She was a practical girl, the daughter of a
West Virginia coal miner, and she knew that eventually everybody's
number came up.  She did everything she could, with all the skill and
power at her disposal, to minimize the chances, and left the rest up
to fate, or Providence, or whatever name you chose to call it by.
	All the same, today was looking like a day with pretty bad
prospects; in all her born days, Paige had never seen a dust-up like
this one.  All hands on deck, as it were.  She'd never seen so many
Sentinels, to say nothing of the heavily armed paramilitary types.
	The X-Men had lost three of their hardest hitters for this
kind of fight a few years back, when Don Griffin had returned and then
vanished again, taking Wolverine and Colossus with him.  The armored
Time Lord's disappearance had left other holes in the roster, too, and
they were all being felt today.  They were short one of their other
A-list players, too, but the absence of Scott "Cyclops" Summers had
nothing to do with Griffin's disappearance.
	On the other hand, they had a few members now that would have
been unthought-of in Griffin's day, and one of them was squarely in
the front lines now, making up for the lack of Piotr Rasputin.  Paige
still wasn't sure exactly what had sparked Cain Marko's change of
heart, but watching him in action now, she was merely glad something
had.  The Juggernaut was their best chance of getting out of this mess
alive.
	It would be a bit silly, she thought, for the X-Men to make
their last stand on this dinky island in the middle of nowhere,
without even knowing who commanded the forces that destroyed them;
but, though no one had gotten killed yet, if things continued as they
were, that might be just what happened.
	And the day had started out so promisingly, too - 
	A flicker of motion in the sky caught Paige's eye, and she
turned her gaze from the chaos of battle to see what had caused it.  A
missile, perhaps, or an aircraft?  Or, God forbid, yet still more
Sentinels arriving?
	No - it was a man, a lone man, and Paige wasn't sure how to
react to the sight of him.  In his time, he'd been on both sides of
conflicts involving the X-Men, and it was anyone's guess what his
presence meant now.
	Paige was right next to Professor Charles Xavier's hoverchair,
part of the Professor's guard, which was a point of pride (though she
half-suspected him of having asked her to stay near him to keep -her-
out of trouble; she was the youngest X-Man, after all).  Now she
turned to him, her face a question, but he wasn't looking at her.  His
patrician face was turned to the sky, watching the new arrival as he
swooped over the raging battle.  He settled to the ground in front of
Xavier, his cloak falling around him.
	"Charles," said Magneto cordially.  He nodded to his old
friend and adversary, then, to Paige's surprise, gave her a polite
inclination of his helmeted head as well.  "Miss Guthrie.  You're
looking well.  You seem to have a bit of a problem, Charles."
	Despite the desperate situation, Xavier smiled thinly.  "It
could be said," he allowed.
	Magneto folded his arms and watched the fight for a bit.  Here
the Juggernaut strode relentlessly forward, dragging soldiers who had
latched onto all four of his limbs; he wouldn't waste the energy to
shake them off until he needed his hands free for something, like
tearing the leg off the next Sentinel he got to.  There Cannonball,
Paige's brother Sam, blasted clean through the chest of a Sentinel,
sending the monstrous machine down with a pillar of smoke and an
electronic scream.  Lightning flashed overhead as a tornado tore
through part of the formation.
	"Hmph," said Magneto after a few moments.  "Magnificent,
aren't they?  You've taught them well, Charles - and my own modest
contributions to their training haven't hurt either," he added wryly.
"All the same, it appears they're in over their heads.  I hope you
won't mind if I lend them a bit of assistance."
	Without waiting for an answer, Magneto took a step forward and
rose back into the air, his cloak rustling softly as he levered
himself away from the Earth by the planet's own magnetic field.  Once
at a higher vantage point, he started working.
	Having been designed with the eventuality of battling mutants
in mind, Sentinels were equipped to handle a wide variety of threats,
and one of the best-known mutant threats was Magneto.  Still, making
them out of materials impervious to the Master of Magnetism's power
would have been too costly, so their construction still incorporated
ferrous metals.  It was a limitation their creators had known and
accepted.
	Now it came back to haunt their creations... but there were so
-many- of them here today that it seemed like for each one Magneto
pulled apart, two more appeared to replace it.
	Once they saw that he wasn't here to attack them, the X-Men
rallied around Magneto.  This was both good and bad, as it turned
out.  The Sentinels knew a few things about him, and one of the things
they knew was the usual effective range of his power - so they stayed
outside that range and lobbed attacks into the circle thus created.
	That forced the X-Men to either fight back with their own
ranged attacks or move, and moving damaged their defensive cohesion.
That didn't matter to some of them - Juggernaut kept on doing what he
did, for instance - but the rest ended up herded into a cluster around
Magneto and Professor X.
	"We've got to break out of this circle or we're going to get
cut to pieces!" Lucas Bishop barked to Xavier.
	Xavier nodded and turned to Magneto, who had let himself back
down to the ground.  The strain of holding the mechanical killers back
was telling on him; his face was stippled with sweat and stiff with
what might have been pain.  Paige, shocked by the thought of human
frailty attaching to Magneto, reminded herself that he wasn't a young
man.  Hadn't she read in the Professor's files about him that he'd
been a boy during World War II?
	"Erik, can you open us an exit route?" asked Professor X.
	Magneto shook his head.  "Not without leaving us open to the
ones at our backs," he replied.  Then his jawline hardened, his eyes
glinting, and he straightened his back with a clear effort.  "But that
won't be necessary.  I'll show these mechanical aberrations what it
means to trifle with Magneto."
	Xavier looked concerned.  "Erik, you don't look well.  Don't
overextend yourself.  Lucas and Cain can keep our backs covered long
enough for - "
	"Enough!" Magneto snapped.  "Don't mother me, Charles.  I'm
not an old woman.  I am the Master of Magnetism!"  The helmeted mutant
levitated again, his hands flung open at his sides.  He closed his
eyes, marshaling all his strength as he prepared to push his area of
influence beyond its normal limits, catch the encircling Sentinels by
surprise, and tear them to pieces.  They would be destroyed before
they could react to the terrible realization that their precious
target data was incorrect.
	Magneto's hands at his sides clenched into fists, every muscle
in his body quivering with effort.  Sentinels around the perimeter
began to twitch and spark as his power rippled out and tore at them - 
	- and then all hell broke loose.
	The ground shook - no, the -world- shook - as a hot, violent
wind that was none of Storm's doing suddenly shrieked across the
embattled island.  The sky abruptly turned to a swirling, nauseating
combination of black and a horrid shade of orange, shot through with
gnarled lightning of the same unnatural color.
	Paige Guthrie's mind turned inside out as some force wrenched
at her on a level just above the threshold of her perception.  The
last thing she heard, over the howling wind and the consternated cries
of her friends and teammates, was Magneto's deep voice bellowing,
"CHAAAARLES - !"
	- and then, with a sickening lurch of pseudomotion, she was
first sucked into a chaos of an order well above her mind's ability to
perceive, then ejected violently from it and into a world of solid
pain.
	Fortunately, her years of experience as an adventurer had
taught her to keep her wits even when they'd just been yanked bodily
out of her head and stuffed back in.  Instantly, Paige took in her new
situation and drew the correct conclusions:
	- That huge blue-white thing is a planet.
	- That blackness is outer space.
	- That awful pain is exposure to hard vacuum.
	- I have ten, maybe twenty seconds to come up with something
really, REALLY good - or I am DEAD.
	OK... no pressure.
	Faster than she could consciously think, Paige's mind put all
that together and came up with the requisite something - or at least
she hoped it did.  It might not work, in fact it probably wouldn't
work, but now wasn't the time to shy away from pushing the envelope.
	With arms and fingers already stiffening, she reached up, took
hold of her long blonde hair, and yanked.  She'd done this countless
times, and she knew the sensations it caused intimately.  It felt
strange, sure, pulling all your skin off would tend to, wouldn't it;
but it normally didn't hurt.
	This time, it hurt.
	A lot.
	As she fell toward the planet, the upper atmosphere just
beginning to slow her fall, the pain inside overwhelmed the pain
outside and she blacked out.  Her last thought - she expected it to be
her last thought ever - was:
	Oh, God... I just made a horrible pun.

			     7 TEMPLE WAY
			NEKOMIKOKA, TOMODACHI
			       7:15 PM
		       FRIDAY, AUGUST 17, 2407

	Keiichi Morisato, professor of mechanical engineering at the
Nekomi Institute of Technology, stood in his yard with a shovel on his
shoulder and planned his attack.
	For several years now, his wife Belldandy had wanted a koi
pond in the courtyard outside their converted-temple home, but Keiichi
hadn't gotten around to digging it.  It was a project that he expected
would take up a good weekend.
	Well, he'd decided that weekend was this weekend, so now he
stood considering his options.  He'd need to pull up the paving flags,
of course, but before he could do that, he'd have to settle on a size
and shape for the pond.  He could have done that with a plan of the
temple complex, he supposed - he was an engineer and draftsman - but
for landscaping, he'd always found that the best way was just to go
out and see how things looked on the actual site.
	An afternoon breeze ruffled his t-shirt.  Keiichi smiled; it
had been a hot week, and the breeze felt good.  In fact, quite a wind
seemed to be picking up, now that he noticed.  Might there be a storm
coming?  And why had the afternoon light turned orange?  It wasn't
anywhere near sunset-time - 
	"Keiichi!" a familiar voice cried off to his left.  He turned,
and in the next instant there was a figure beside him, crashing into
him.  "Get - "  A sudden, chilly dislocation, a sensation of falling.
" - DOWN!"
	Not for the first time in his life, Keiichi Morisato found
himself abruptly flat on his back with his face buried in his elder
sister-in-law's cleavage.  He extracted it and looked around; from
what he could see, he was now over on the other side of the courtyard,
next to the garage.
	"Urd," he grumbled, shoving her off, "what in - "
	A meteor streaked down out of the sky and slammed into the
courtyard, right where he'd been standing a moment ago.  Urd scrambled
up and hastily cast a barrier spell, deflecting the chunks of flaming
debris that came their way, as the shockwave rippled out from the
impact and shattered every courtyard-facing window in the complex.
	Keiichi, with the kind of calmness that only comes of having
been married to a goddess for a couple of centuries, waited for
everything to stop clattering, tinkling, and crumbling, then got to
his feet and surveyed the destruction glumly.  It wasn't really too
bad, except for the windows; decades of protection magics had kept the
buildings intact when, really, everything on the hilltop should have
been flattened.
	A moment later, Belldandy Morisato slid the door to the main
house open and stepped outside, a concerned look on her face.  "What
was that noi - oh MY," she said, pausing as she took in the smoking
crater and the shattered windows.  "Keiichi, are you all right?"
	"Fine, thanks to Urd," Keiichi replied.  He picked his way
through the scattered rubble and stood at the edge of the crater,
scrubbing in consternation at the unruly brown hair on the top of his
head.
	"Well," he said wryly, "here's your koi pond!"
	Bell chuckled as she made her way to his side.  "What do you
suppose did this?"
	"I dunno," Keiichi replied.  He waved aside the smoke still
rising from the crater, then jumped down from the edge and started
making his way to the bottom.
	"Be careful!" Bell called after him as Urd came up beside her.
"It might still be hot."
	The wind shifted, blowing the smoke clear, and Keiichi pulled
up sharply about halfway down the crater as he saw what lay in the
bottom of it.
	"... Oh, it's still hot, all right," said Urd dryly.
	"Urd!" Belldandy remonstrated - out of mere reflex, since she
was herself gaping in shock at the object which had demolished her
courtyard.
	"Now that's a real shame," Urd went on, unperturbed, "when
folks be throwin' away a perfectly good white girl like that."

	       /*  The Alarm  "Change II"  _Change_  */

		I have a message from another time...

		     Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
			       presents

		UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT

			    Lost and Found,
		      or, A Time Lord's Holiday

			       starring
			  Donald E. Griffin
			  Katherine Griffin
			    and many more

			 Benjamin D. Hutchins
			 with Kris Overstreet

		(c) 2003 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


			   1 ALLARD AVENUE
			NEW AVALON, ZETA CYGNI
			       7:20 PM

	Kitty Griffin and her husband Don didn't eat out all that
often, first because they were both decent cooks, and second because
Don, not having a day job, had plenty of time to do that kind of
thing.  They sometimes joked about their domestic arrangement; Kitty
was fairly certain she was the only woman in the universe who could
claim a Time Lord as a house-husband.
	Today was a special occasion, or at least Don had decreed it
one; and so here they were at Allard's, the fancy-but-worth-it
restaurant on the ground floor of the Imperial Hotel Monolith, dressed
to the nines.  They didn't do -that- very often either, and so Don was
taking the opportunity to savor the sight of his love in that
strapless crushed-black-velvet number she only wore on days like this.
        Next to her grace and beauty, Don felt rather oafish and
coarse.  It had ever been such; she was a dancer and a figure skater,
and he was, well, not.  Though he kept in good condition, he could
never be called 'slim', and though she'd taught him to dance, he'd
never consider himself very good at it.  Even in his classically
styled black-and-white tuxedo, cut to accentuate the breadth of his
shoulders and outfitted with a scarlet vest and tie and shoes so shiny
you could see yourself in them, he felt like a sort of caveman.
        But so be it.  A caveman he may be, but he was a well-heeled
caveman - and he was the caveman she had chosen.
	Good enough.
	He looked across the table and saw her hazel eyes glinting at
him above a private little smile, knew that she'd just followed his
entire train of thought, and raised his wineglass.
	"To halfway!" he said.
	"I'll drink to -that-," Kitty replied wryly, and tapped her
glass ringingly to his. The day before, Kitty had announced her
official, incontrovertible, random guess that she was halfway done
with her master's thesis.  Since said thesis had been eating her brain
even more dramatically than had her undergraduate studies, that was
cause for celebration in Don's eyes, and so here they were.
	He was about to say something else, possibly a toast to the
eventual Doctor Katherine Pryde Griffin, but as he opened his mouth to
do so, he saw her eyes go slightly unfocused, a look of internal
concentration.  Don knew all of her looks, so he knew immediately what
this one was: She was focusing on her International Police Lens,
receiving a message from another Lensman.
	After a few seconds, she blinked, coming back to the room,
then looked at Don.
	"Something up?" Don asked.
	Kitty nodded.  "That was Gryphon," she said.
	Don raised an eyebrow.  "The First Lensman himself!" he
remarked.  "What's on his mind tonight?"
	Kitty smiled wryly.  "He says a friend of his over on
Tomodachi had a girl fall from the sky a little while ago and wreck
his yard, and the IPO observatory logged some kind of high-energy
spacetime event at about the same time, and would I please see if you
might be interested in checking it out?"
	Don raised the other eyebrow.  "Girl falling from the sky?
Yeah, that's our flavor of weird.  Do we have time to finish dinner?"
	"Sure.  He'd like us to stop by his office before we head out,
though."
	Don nodded, then sat back, surveyed his wineglass, and sighed
with mock glumness.  "And here we thought we were going to have a
nice, boring weekend at home... "
	Kitty giggled and signaled to the waiter for more bread.

			   UNKNOWN LOCATION
			       7:25 PM

	Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, better known to almost everyone in his
home reality as Magneto, was a man of rather aristocratic tastes and
manner.  He was a fastidious man, a snappy dresser, and liked things
to be dignified and calm.
	As such, he was momentarily nonplussed to find himself
awakening face-down on what seemed to be grimy asphalt.
	Slowly, painfully, he levered himself up to his hands and
knees.  His dignity prevented him from letting out the groan he really
wanted to let out as he raised his protesting frame upright.  As his
abused back crackled, straightening, he couldn't help but have the
thought, cliche though it was, that he was getting too old for this
kind of thing.
	He looked around - situational awareness was very important at
times like this - and immediately took note of two things:
	- He was no longer on a deserted island; instead, he appeared
to have awakened in an urban alley, a grimy, garbage-strewn one.
	- Charles Xavier was sprawled on the ground next to his
overturned hoverchair, having apparently arrived wherever they were
along with Magneto.
	Down at the end of an alley, a bum who had been sleeping under
a blanket of newspapers, very handily (if inadvertently) camouflaged
among the garbage, sat up, blinked blearily in Magneto's direction,
and inquired,
	"Hey BUDDY - did you jus' see a real bright light?"
	Magneto ignored him and knelt next to Xavier.  Having
determined that his old friend was, in fact, alive, the Master of
Magnetism was considering his options, and wondering whether there was
anything to be done about his pounding headache, when there was a
strange mechanical whirring sound behind him and light suddenly filled
the alley.
	Straightening, Magneto turned to see a car - no, a hovercraft
of some kind, it had no wheels - stopped at the mouth of the alley.
There were three young men in it; one of them was shining a flashlight
at him.
	"Hey, man," said the one with the flashlight.  In his other
hand, he held a weapon of some kind, and he leveled it along with the
light as he grinned.  "Nice hat."

			NEKOMIKOKA, TOMODACHI
			       8:04 PM

	After everything else that had gone on that day, Keiichi
Morisato wasn't particularly taken aback by the sight of a Pepsi
machine materializing out of nowhere in the corner of his yard.
Besides, Gryphon had warned him that the troubleshooters he was
sending to look into their little incident would be arriving that way.
	For a moment, he thought it was Gryphon himself who was
emerging when the front of the machine swung open; then he got a
better look and realize that it wasn't.
	The man coming out of the Pepsi machine wore a dark green
trenchcoat with little silver circled-X badges on the collar tabs, a
red t-shirt with an orange design on the front that reminded Keiichi
of a Celtic knot, blue jeans, and battered jungle boots, and though
his clean-shaven face bore a distinct resemblance to Gryphon's, he was
noticeably taller and his hair was black.  They weren't alike, but
they could have been brothers.
	There was a woman with him, and for a second Keiichi thought
-she- was Gryphon's eldest daughter Kaitlyn.  She had the same slim
build and the same long, slightly curly brown hair - but her face was
different, she wore no glasses, and she, too, was a bit taller.  She
was dressed similarly, in jeans and a t-shirt, and her belt buckle had
that same circled-X design on it.  She also, Keiichi was mildly
surprised to note, wore a Japanese-style sword on her back, its
black-wrapped grip jutting up above her left shoulder.
	The green-coated newcomer shut the Pepsi machine behind him,
and then he and his companion crossed the yard toward Keiichi.
	"Professor Morisato?" he said, and when Keiichi nodded, he put
out a hand.  "Don Griffin; my wife, Kitty."
	"Pleased to meet you," Keiichi said, shaking both their
hands.  "Call me Keiichi.  Gryphon sent you, right?"  He laughed
lightly at himself.  "For a second I thought you were him."
	Don laughed.  "I get that a lot," he said, then turned to
survey the crater at whose edge Keiichi stood.  "Well!  This is your
visitor's divot, I take it?"
	"This is it," Keiichi agreed.  "Come on inside.  Whoever she
is, she's still asleep."
	They went inside and were introduced to Keiichi's wife Bell,
their several children (who filtered curiously in and out and never
slowed down enough for Don or Kitty to get a decent fix on them), and
Bell's sister Urd.  Don and Kitty knew her other sister, Skuld, who
was a colleague of Keiichi's at the Nekomi Institute of Technology and
also worked as the International Police's chief technologist, but had
never met the rest of the family before.
	Just as they were getting ready to head back to the guest room
for a look at the unexpected arrival, there was a knock at the door;
Bell went to answer it and returned a moment later with a trio of
people who were well-known to Don and Kitty.
	"Logan!" said Kitty with a smile as she went to embrace the
short, burly man in the lead.
	"Well, Jubilation," Don added with an air of satisfaction.
"Fancy seeing you here."
	Logan's companion, an Asian girl in her late teens dressed
(somewhat unseasonably) in what looked like a grey rain slicker over
shorts and an Art of Noise t-shirt, trotted across the room and
grabbed the Time Lord up in a hug.
	"Yeah, big surprise, I -figure-," said Jubilation Lee with a
grin.  "I only live here."
	"Hey, Don," said Logan, shaking the taller man's hand once
Jubilee let go of him.  "Got the word from Gryph on the Lens, figured
we'd swing by and see what we could do."
	The third man in the group was wearing a tweed suit and looked
every inch the college physics professor - except that he was
exceedingly muscular, clawed, fanged, equipped with digitigrade legs
and a very leonine muzzled face, and covered in blue fur.
	This didn't change the fact that he -was- a college physics
professor, but it did tend to catch some people off-guard.
	Dr. Henry McCoy, also known as the Beast for obvious reasons,
smiled and said, "I don't suppose you know anything more about it than
he does?"
	"Hank!" said Griffin delightedly.  He seized the blue
scientist's proffered paw and shook it.  "They actually let you out
of your lab?"
	"Academia has not yet built the prison from which the
boisterous Beast cannot escape in the name of high adventure, Donald,"
McCoy replied airily.  "Which reminds me," he added, becoming more
serious, "when are you coming to work for me?  The mysteries of time
and space cry out to be explained to our brighter students."
	Don chuckled.  "Not until Kitty's through with her master's,"
he told McCoy.  "She's thinking of doing her doctorate at NIT,
and if she does, then I'll see about getting work here - though I
might go over to Hotohori and see if they want a history prof
instead.  I'm not sure the Council would like it if I started throwing
back the veil of spacetime to a bunch of 25th-century physics
undergrads," he said with a wry grin.
	McCoy laughed.  "Fair enough."  He turned to Kitty, who had
finished exchanging greetings with Logan and Jubilee.  "Donald tells
me you might be thinking coming to NIT for your doctorate work."
	Kitty smiled, feigning exhaustion.  "If I ever finish my
frxgzntr -master's-," she said wryly.
	The Beast grinned widely, showing his muzzleful of long,
pointed teeth.  "Ah, that's something I've greatly missed about you,
Kitty.  You swear more creatively than anyone else I know."
	"That's because I learned to swear mostly from Lockheed,"
Kitty replied, laughing.
	"Where -is- the purple dragon, anyway?" Jubilee wondered.
	"Probably still sleeping in the laundry hamper," Don said.
	"He'll turn up if we need him," said Kitty, nodding.
	"So," said the Beast.  "Not that I'm opposed to socializing,
but - what do we know about the situation at hand?"
	"Not much, so far," Griffin replied.  "The TARDIS's
dimensional monitors did pick up a high-energy chronosynclastic event
about two hours ago, but it didn't last long enough for the system to
record any useful tracking data.  All we've really got to go on is in
the Morisatos' guest room right now."  He turned, smiling, to Bell.
"Which is a segue if I've ever heard one."

	"I can't imagine where she could have come from, poor dear,"
said Belldandy compassionately as she led the five back toward the
guest bedroom.  "Falling from the sky like that, initially I thought
she might be a colleague of mine, but she doesn't have the right aura
for it.  She's a mortal, whoever she is."
	Don and Kitty glanced at each other and smiled at the offhand
way Bell had put that; they knew, by way of knowing Skuld, that
Belldandy Morisato was a goddess.
	They arrived at the guest room door; Bell slid it open
slightly, glancing in through the crack, then smiled and opened it a
little wider.  "Hello!" she said.  "I'm glad to see you awake.  Don't
worry, you're among friends.  Do you feel all right?"
	"I... I think so," a soft voice replied hesitantly.  The four
X-Men glanced at each other, their faces all bearing identical "what
the?!" expressions.  Then Bell opened the door the rest of the way, so
that they could all see the visitor: a pretty young woman with blue
eyes and long blonde hair, dressed in a flannel nightgown, sitting up
on the room's low Tomodachi-style bed-cushion, and looking mildly
puzzled.
	Jubilee's face went blank with astonishment; she edged past
Belldandy into the room, gazing hard at the blonde stranger, and then
said in a voice just a little above a whisper, "Hayseed?"
	The blonde girl blinked, her face taking on exactly the same
expression.  "Mallrat?" she murmured.
	Jubilee lunged forward and caught her up in an embrace.
	"Well," said Don.  It seemed to be the only really appropriate
thing to say.

		     SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, EARTH
			5:27 PM (PACIFIC TIME)

  /*  G.F. Handel  "Alla Hornpipe"  Water Music Suite No. 2 in D  */

	Charles Xavier came back to consciousness to the sounds of
classical music and a rustling sound that he identified a moment later
as wind rushing past a speeding vehicle.  He opened his eyes, looked
around, and then blinked in disbelief.
	He was in a car, which wasn't all that surprising in itself
(unless one considered where he'd been -last-), but -what- a car.  The
bench seat he was sitting on was upholstered in what appeared to be
fake zebra; the dash was upholstered too, in what looked like red
leather, with big round quilting buttons.  There was a nodding-Jesus
statue affixed to the center of the dash, and the steering wheel was
made of welded chain links.
	And sitting behind that steering wheel, apparently perfectly
content with his surroundings, was none other than Erik Lehnsherr, one
arm resting on the top of the driver's door, one gloved hand gripping
the top of the outlandish steering wheel.  Magneto was humming along
with the radio, his helmet sitting on the seat beside him, next to a
paper bag.
	Noticing his passenger's movement, Lehnsherr smiled.  "Ah,
Charles, you're awake," he said.  "Good.  How do you feel?"
	"Disoriented.  Confused," Xavier answered truthfully.  "Erik,
where -are- we?"
	Lehnsherr smiled ironically, looking out the windshield, then
gestured negligently with his hand on the steering wheel.  "Two miles
from the Bayshore Expressway, apparently."  He switched hands on the
wheel, rummaged in the paper bag, and offered Xavier a small packet.
"Corn Nuts?"
	Xavier absent-mindedly took the packet, tore it open, and
started eating as he looked out the car's windows at their
surroundings.  It was a fairly ordinary highway, but the city around
it was anything but ordinary from his perspective, and he couldn't
help but notice that a decent proportion of the traffic around them
didn't appear to have -wheels-.  And up ahead... 
	"This isn't our world," he mused after a few moments.
	"That's what I've always admired about you, Charles," Magneto
said pleasantly as he guided the car under a huge, arching holographic
sign reading,

WELCOME to SAN DIEGO - HOME of the GAMES of the CXXX OLYMPIAD in 2412!

	"Nothing can ever elude your notice," Lehnsherr went on dryly,
"no matter how subtle."  Then his eyes narrowed as he caught sight of
something in the rearview mirror.  "Oh, -blast-," he said.
	"What?" Xavier inquired.
	"Well, unless those signals have a different meaning in this
world," Magneto replied conversationally, "I would guess that the
owner of this... remarkable... vehicle has regained consciousness and
reported it missing."  He put both hands on the wheel.  "Hold on,
Charles, this may get... interesting."
	"You may as well stop for them, Erik, and avoid a dangerous
chase," said Xavier resignedly.  "Under the circumstances, I can deal
with the police."
	The radio stopped playing music at that point, and a voice
said, "That was the hornpipe from Georg Friedrich Handel's Water Music
Suite in D.  It's 5:30 PM and time for the news.  President Clark
announced today that he would not seek re-election next year, choosing
instead to run for the Federation Senate.
	"In other news, the Psi Corps today announced the capture of
an outlaw telepath cell in Vienna, including the infamous P12 blip
Marcus Warren, who spent over 19 months on the Most Wanted list.
Search operations are escalating in all planetary sectors, officials
say, in hopes that the bust will cause other terrorist telepath cells
to react and break cover.  More news after this important message."
	As an advertisement for toothpaste began, Xavier and Lehnsherr
slowly turned their heads and met each other's eyes.
	Without comment, Magneto put his helmet back on.
	"On second thought," said Professor X, "perhaps we'd best
avoid the authorities for now."
	Magneto nodded calmly and put his foot down.

			     KAEBELSTADT
			      SWISS ALPS
		  2:27 AM (8:27 PM NEW AVALON TIME)

        "Stand down from security alert.  Intruder located; she's
unconscious."
        "So, who do you think she is?"
        "Beats me.  Scanners show Earth human with a couple of
oddities.  Check chromosome 19."
        "... what the hell?  The telepathy complex isn't supposed to
be -there- !"
        "Tell -her- that.  She's got to be a blip.  Her genescan
doesn't appear anywhere in our database."
        "Ja.  So, you think escape attempt maybe?"
        "... no, I don't think so.  There's no vehicle and no cover
for them to sneak away in.  And look here, and here, where the snow
melted around her."
        "Snow melts around people."
        "Not in a hemispherical crater.  I think we have a DDP here."
        "A DDP telepath?  You can't be serious.  The odds of that - "
        "You don't play poker, do you?"
        "Nein.  My grandmother taught me to play klabberjaas, and
that's the only card game I play."
        "Well, look up 'royal flush' in a book sometime.  When someone
deals me a royal flush, I don't ask for a re-deal.  Security, get a
med team prepped, heavy sedatives and psi inhibitors at the ready.
We're bringing down an unregistered blip of unknown power.  Identity
unknown."
        "Is a royal flush good?"
        "Almost as good as a teep with no identification, no origin,
and no family or friends to look for her."
        "Ah.  So the Corps just got a new kinder."
        "Yep.  And a redhead too.  Quite a looker.  Think she'll
remember me when they get done with her?"
        "If they do the job right, she won't remember -herself- when
they get done with her."
        "Yeah, too bad.  Gimme a hand with her, willya?"
        "I hope that snow holds off until our shift ends."
        "Me too.  Looks like one hell of a storm blowing up."

			   CFA NEW ORLEANS
			UNINHABITABLE SECTIONS
		  FREESPACER HOME FLEET, ZETA CYGNI
			       8:29 PM

	Bobby Drake reflected, upon regaining consciousness, that
among the many bad things a person might hear upon awakening, "I got
dibs on his boots" ranked somewhere around forty-third.  Not as bad as
"At last, X-Men, I have you totally in my power," but worse than
"Whattaya doin' in bed wit my goil, ya joik?!"
	Long experience with getting knocked out and captured by
probably hostile individuals had taught Bobby to keep his breathing
slow, steady and shallow while two people pawed his clothes looking
for valuables.  He cracked an eyelid just wide enough to get a view of
the two shadows, noting the placement of their hands.
	When the first mugger screamed at the sudden appearance of icy
handcuffs around his wrists, that's when Bobby came to life.  A quick
left hook knocked away the other thief, and a boot to the head
silenced the first one.  Bobby iced up the hands and feet of the
second thief, binding him securely.  The whole thing had taken maybe
three seconds.
	Bobby stood up, dusting himself off.  Wherever he was, it was
narrow; if he were just a fraction taller, he'd have to stoop to keep
his head from bumping the ceiling.  Every surface was metal except the
floor, and that was metal littered with garbage of some sort.  Light
only came into the passage from either end.  Bobby made the mistake of
looking directly at the light and had to squint for a few moments to
recover his night vision.
	Despite the smell of the corridor, Bobby took a deep breath.
The air was climate-controlled; low humidity, luckily he didn't need
to worry about -that- for icing purposes any longer.  He was indoors
somewhere big, and based on past experience he was willing to bet he
was on a spaceship of some kind.
	Obviously not the first-class accommodations.  Must have a
word with the cruise director.
	That established, he examined his assailants, both human, both
wearing ragged clothing not washed in decades.  Thief was probably too
strong a word for either of them; judging by the jagged knife he found
on the unconscious man's belt, murderer might not be strong enough.
Blood was still encrusted on the hilt.  He retrieved his wallet; a
moment later, he decided to go through the muggers' pockets as well.
Fair's fair, he thought, only to be disappointed when he came up empty
on both.
	"All right," he said, smiling at the conscious thug, "maybe
you could tell me where I am, hmm?"
	The mugger babbled incoherently.
	"Oh, wait, I forgot," Bobby said, "yes, I'm a mutant, booga
booga, now that we've got that out of the way, where the -hell- am I?"
	More babbling.  It dawned on Bobby that he'd picked the wrong
thief to send to dreamland.
	"Never mind," he said.  "Those'll melt in about twenty
minutes.  I suggest you see a doctor right away... frostbite can kill,
you know."
	More babbling as Bobby walked off down the corridor.
	The end of the corridor had jagged edges; obviously someone
had created an unauthorized exit where the original designers hadn't
intended one to be.  Air blew through the cross-passageway, which was
lit by a series of bare light fixtures.  Wires patched into the power
conduits linking the fixtures snaked back and forth along the
floor... deck, Bobby corrected himself, this is a ship, that is the
deck.  And these things are bulkheads... or hulls?  He never -could-
keep nautical terms straight.
	Another unauthorized door opened onto a largish area, and
Bobby looked through to see what, to him, looked like a Central
American village built from the scraps of a Galaxy Quest set.  He saw
between twenty and thirty people huddled here and there, mostly
filthy, all hungry-looking.  Open fires burned here and there in front
of cobbled-together hovels that hugged the walls of the chamber.  An
immense central shaft ran down the center of the chamber, with a door
in the side of it labeled TURBOLIFT MAINTENANCE ACCESS #C971.
	Bobby walked along the shacks, looking appalled.  Over half
the faces he saw were alien - definitively alien, not just
mutant-weird.  One green guy with a hollow snout for a mouth and
sucker-tipped fingers said something rude at him as he passed in a
language he didn't understand.  Bobby shrugged and kept walking, and
the green guy said it again, louder.
	Then Bobby got hit in the side by about ninety pounds of
fast-moving meat, and he went to the deck hard.
	"What the hell was -that- for?" Bobby grunted, pushing the
small figure off of himself.  He'd just been tackled by Oliver Twist,
if Oliver had green hair and a triangle mark in the middle of his
forehead.
	"Whattaya, some kinda dirtfoot?" the kid snapped.  He pointed
at the deck plate Bobby had been about to step on.  "That plate won't
take your weight!  Take a close look!"
	Bobby, nonplussed, did as the kid suggested.  He noticed,
almost immediately, that the gravity near the plate was a lot lower
than back in the air vent.  He also noticed, with concern, a soft
hissing sound where the plate joined the others around it.  "Is it
supposed to be hissing?" he said.
	"You -are- a dirtfoot," the kid grumbled.  "There's no -air-
on th' other sidea that plate.  Step in th' middle of that, and you,
th' plate, an' all th' air here gets a ride out ta th' good ship Dead,
cop it?"
	"Copped bigtime," Bobby said, picking himself up and edging
his way back from the loose plate.  "But isn't that unsafe?"
	"'Cos it is," the kid said.  "Didja expect safe in th'
Uninhabitable Sections?"
	"I didn't know -what- to expect," Bobby admitted.  "I'm kind
of lost."
	"Kind of lost," the kid grumbled.  "Dredd's a little cranky,
and you're kind of lost."  The little head shook dubiously; a grubby
gloved hand pointed back the way he came.  "Take a left in the air
vent, two rights and another left, then twenty meters up the access
ladder," he said, "that'll let you out in the residential compartments
behind Corridor Two.  You can find your way back to your hotel or
shuttle from there."
	"Um, yeah," Bobby said.  "Thanks."  Confused, he began walking
back the way he had come.  Kids these days have no respect for their
elders... he thought, then groaned, wondering, When the hell did I
become an elder?
	Probably about the time of that stupid X-Factor fiasco.  Yeah.
	Bobby was almost back to the vents when he heard a squeal of
pain behind him.  Shouts of pain and fear.  Familiar, kid-sized
shouts.
	It sucks having a conscience, Bobby thought as he ran back
into the shantytown.  The inhabitants had vanished, except for the
kid; he was being held up by his arms by a large guy with green skin
who didn't look bulky or ugly enough to be the Hulk.  He was dressed
much like his four colleages, each in matching leather jackets, dark
pants, and not much else.  The shortest of the five held a small blade
at the kid's stomach, smiling up at him from behind purple glasses.
	"C'mon, kid," the gang leader smiled, "young Mister Lynch
needs a new SoroSuub yacht, and everybody in th' organization donates
their share.  Now where's your take for th' week, hm?"
	"I gave ya everythin' I had yesterday!" the kid yelped.
	"Only two hundred credits?" the gang leader grinned.  "I know
better than that.  This is Zeta Cygni.  We got tourists and shoppers
out the Jeffries tubes."
	"Home Fleet Security's tightened up," the kid said, and got an
extra twist of the arms for his tone.  "OWW!  Can't-get-into-main-
corridors!"  The grip relaxed, and the kid finished, "An' I ain't
gonna snick th' folks back here!"  That brought another twist of the
arms.
	"You snick who we tell you to, kid," the gang leader said.
"Or else -we- snick -you-.  Get me?"  He nodded to one of his
colleagues, who smiled and popped a quartet of steel claws from one
fist.  Bobby blinked at that; this guy was a blond, so obviously Logan
was owed some royalties somewhere...
	No time for that now.  Let's get this over with.
	"Ahem."
	The gang turned to look at Bobby.  "Heh," the leader said,
"fresh meat.  Nice circus threads, Zed," he grinned, thumbing a switch
on his knife that set it to vibrating, "allow me to adjust it to fit."
	Bobby took one quick look around.  Nobody else very nearby,
not that he figured it would really matter if anybody saw what he was
about to do anyway, not here.
	The first ice spike caught the gang leader in the knife hand.
The blade fell to the deck, rattling loudly against the steel and
making it impossible for Bobby to hear the shouting as he planted a
fist right in the gang leader's face, breaking his nose and sending
him down.
	The big green guy dropped the kid, cracked his knuckles, and
charged Bobby.  How Juggernaut of you, Bobby thought, laying a quick
skim of ice on the deck immediately in front of him.  Then he stepped
aside, laying out more ice slick as the green thug slipped, fell, and
slid along the deck into a hovel, which collapsed around his head.
	Two down, three to go.  Two of the gang members pulled some
kind of gun, the third popped out his claws and smiled unpleasantly.
Smiles turned to screams as Bobby dropped the metal temperature of
both guns and claws down to liquid-nitrogen levels.  The clawed goon
screamed with pain, collapsing to his knees; the gunmen pried their
weapons off their hands, holding the frozen flesh to them, and took
off running.
	Bobby picked up the head of the gang leader, who was groaning
his way back to consciousness.  "Wake up, sunshine," Bobby growled.
"I got a message for you and your bosses."
	"Uuuugh?"
	"I want you to tell all your friends about me."
	"Wh-who are you?"
	Bobby picked up the gang leader - he didn't weigh much, maybe a
hundred forty - and stared him in the eyes.
	Then, as the gang leader stared back at him in horrified
fascination, Bobby Drake's body turned from warm, breathing flesh to
cold, hard, glittering silver-white ice, his skin becoming translucent
and then smooth and hard as his eyes turned to blue-grey crystals.
	"I'm Iceman," he said.
	Bobby dropped the gang leader, who scrambled back from him,
then forward again as he got too close to that hissing deck plate.
"Give me your jacket," he said.
	"W-what?"
	"Give me your -jacket-," Iceman said.  "That thing's too big
for you anyway, but it should fit me just about perfect."
	It didn't.  It was long enough, and the sleeves were about
right, but it was cut so that the bright shiny zipper teeth on the
front couldn't come together on anyone with more of a chest than Olive
Oyl.  Iceman slipped it on anyway; shiny black pleather on white ice.
Nice statement.
	"Now scram," he said.
	"What?"
	"Beat it!" Bobby barked.  "And tell your friends that if I
find anyone else down here holding people up by the arms and
threatening dissection," (he reached out a hand and sent a blast of
ice down to silence that damn vibroknife,) "then I will be VERY
UPSET."  Vapor came off his fist as he held it over the gangster's
face.  "Got the message?"
	The gang leader nodded, then split.  With him went the big
green thug, who looked fearfully at the white figure who'd just taken
out the whole gang.  The clawed guy just stayed curled up on the
ground, groaning loudly.  On the one hand, Bobby felt sorry for the
guy; he'd need immediate medical treatment to save those arms.  On the
other hand, considering what that guy would have done to -him-...
screw it.
	Time to make an exit.  Standing tall, squaring his shoulders,
he walked off to the air vent.  As he went, his body reverted to
normal, trailing condensate vapor in his wake.  By the time he was out
of sight, he was fully human again... which was a good thing, because
he couldn't hold in the laughter anymore.
	"Hahahahaha!!" he gasped, collapsing against the bulkhead.
"'I want your jacket.'  How corny!  How ridiculous.  And he GAVE it to
me!  HAHAHA!  'I'm Iceman!' 'I'm Iceman!'"  He broke up completely,
dropping to his knees and gasping for air.
	A wallet landed on the deck in front of him.  It looked
suspiciously like his.
	"Where th' frak do you come from anyway, dirtfoot?" the kid
grumbled.  "I can't spend any of that green garbage.  Where th' frak's
th' United States of America anyway?"
	"Um... Earth," Bobby said, picking up his wallet and examining
the contents.  On the one hand, he'd had his pocket picked... on the
other, he'd just been -rejected- by a pickpocket whose life he'd
saved... because his money wasn't good enough.
	"Well, -that- explains -everything,-" the kid sneered.  "Yer
prolly a Psi Cop.  Some kinda weird TK talent.  G'wan, get jet, we
don't want your kind here."  With that the kid vanished back into the
shantytown.
	Bobby decided not to follow.  Left at the vent, two rights,
left, up twenty meters... was that right?
	Whatever.  He'd find a way out.
	As soon as he found out... oh damn.
	"Kid!  Hey kid!!" he shouted back down the corridor.  "At
least tell me where the hell I -am-!!!"

			   SAENAR, SALUSIA
		  2:15 PM (8:15 PM NEW AVALON TIME)

	Rahne Sinclair came to more abruptly than some in her
position, largely because, just as she was starting to regain
consciousness, someone kicked her soundly in the ribs.
	With a yelp that turned into a snarl, she instinctively rolled
with the blow, shifting as she did so from her relatively fragile
human form to the much more powerful "hybrid" form which lay halfway
between there and her fully lupine form.
	Rahne wasn't a true werewolf; there was nothing supernatural
about her transformation, and the phases of the moon affected her no
more than they did any other woman.  Thanks to her particular spin on
the mutant gift, though, she could do a very convincing impression of
one - and without all the painful transformations and tendencies
toward mindless destruction, too.
	Only after she'd shifted and scrambled to her feet, ready for
action, did it occur to her that that might have been a bad move.  The
human who'd kicked her might react even worse to finding himself
suddenly confronted by a six-foot snarling wolf-girl.
	A moment later, she blinked, realizing that that wasn't going
to be an issue...
	... because the person who had kicked her wasn't human.
	He was human-oid-, a rangy, broad-shouldered fellow with all
his limbs, fingers, and facial features in more or less the right
place; but his face featured a muzzle and was covered in fur, and so,
judging by what was left exposed by his sleeveless t-shirt, was the
rest of him.  He was mostly black with a white streak on his face,
reminding Rahne rather comically of a cartoon skunk.
	He blinked at her, clearly surprised, and then blurted
something in a language she didn't understand.
	"What?" Rahne replied.  "I canna understand ye!"
	He blinked again, then brightened.  "I said whoa, sorry!  I
didn't see you there.  Were you asleep or something?"
	Rahne considered her response for a moment, then said, "Aye,
ah... I guess y'could say that."
	Shouts in that same alien language drifted to where they
stood.  Rahne, realizing the furry man didn't seem inclined to attack
her, took stock of her surroundings.  She was in a small clearing at
the edge of a wood, with trees to one side of her and a large,
fruit-bearing bush to the other.  The calling voices were coming from
the other side of the bush.
	The fellow who'd kicked her - tripped over her, apparently -
shouted something back in the same language, then took his own look
around before smiling, stepping around Rahne, and picking a plastic
disc up off the ground.
	"Funny place to nap," he said pleasantly.  "I'm Kerit, by the
way, Kerit Dagris.  What's your name?" he asked over his shoulder as
he headed around the bush.
	"Rahne," she replied, following automatically.  "Rahne
Sinclair."
	"Rain," said Kerit thoughtfully (if incorrectly) as they
emerged into a big, pleasant, grassy park.  "That's a nice name."
	Several other people like Kerit, three men and a woman, were
standing around in the grassy area, apparently waiting for him.  They
were all dressed similarly, too, in black pants, athletic shoes, and
grey sleeveless t-shirts.  Next to a park bench at the edge of the
grass was a portable music player, what looked like a cooler, and a
pile of white material which Rahne momentarily recognized as a heap of
jackets.
	A perfectly mundane scene of summer fun - except for all
the... fur.
	"Sorry, guys," said Kerit.
	"Hey, Kerit, what is it with you, anyway?" asked the shortest
of the men waiting, his teeth glinting in a broad grin.  "Even out
here, we send you into the bushes for the frisbee, and you come back
with a babe."
	Rahne blushed, comforted by the fact that they'd never see it
through her red-brown fur.
	"Behave, Nellis," said Kerit cheerfully.  "This is Rain
Sinclair."  Gesturing to the man who'd spoken, then the woman, then a
rather barrel-shaped fellow, and then a lanky guy who reminded Rahne
of a furry Sam Guthrie, he went on, "I'd like you to meet Nellis Ells,
his sister Natalie, Marton Dane, and Kelson Berg."
	"Sinclair?" said Dane, frowning thoughtfully.  "That's a human
name, I thought, but... "  He took off his little round glasses,
polished them on the tail of his untucked t-shirt, and put them back
on.  "You look Sirian to me.  Adopted by humans, perhaps?"
	"Marton!" said Natalie Ells, looking scandalized.  Then,
turning a smile to Rahne, she said, "Don't mind Dane, dear.  He was
born without social graces and never taught better."
	Berg, grinning indulgently, walked away shaking his head and
chuckling, headed for the cooler.
	"I merely believe in direct communication," Dane replied
loftily.  In the background, Berg picked up the cooler and carried it
back to the group, holding it up with one hand while he rummaged
inside with the other.
	Rahne could no longer contain her puzzlement.  "Who... who
-are- ye creatures?"
	They all snapped to attention (except Berg, who had put the
cooler down and was now rummaging in it with both hands), and Nellis
Ells declared, "We are Delta Squad, Second Platoon, Company B of the
Imperial Guard!"
	"We are pledged to lay down our lives in defense of Her
Majesty Asrial the First, Queen of Salusia and Empress of the
Interstellar Conglomerate!" Kerit added, and then they all chorused, 
	"LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!"
	While Rahne stared at them in total confusion, Kelson Berg
emerged from the cooler with a dripping glass bottle in each hand.
Grinning laconically, he extended one of them to Rahne and inquired,
	"Wanna beer?"
	Rahne blinked at him, then accepted the bottle, twisted off
the cap, and took a drink without really thinking about it.  Her
exposure to alcoholic beverages was somewhat limited, not to say
nonexistent - there was "conservative", and then there was Rahne's
upbringing somewhere to the right - but she didn't want to be rude.
She was surprised and mildly pleased to discover that it wasn't bad.
	"So," she inquired after a few moments, "what're guardsmen
doin' hangin' round a park, then?"
	"We're off duty," said Kerit.  "Figured we'd get in a little
Ultimate Frisbee.  How about you?  What's a Sirian girl doing sacked
out on the ground in Crown City Park?"
	Here Rahne was presented with a quandary.  On the one hand,
she was an essentially honest person, and letting these people go on
with the misconception that she was a Sirian (whatever that was) was
tantamount to a lie, something that always made her uncomfortable.  On
the other hand, as a mutant in a world unfriendly to mutants, she'd
become accustomed to being secretive about herself and her origins.
	So she hesitated, looking contemplatively at Kerit, for
several seconds; and in those several seconds, he started to look a
little worried.
	"Hey," he said, his voice compassionate rather than
accusatory, "you're not on the run or something, are you?"
	Rahne blinked.  "Certainly not!" she replied.  Then she
frowned thoughtfully and said, "Well, not -really-, I s'pose... "
	She wasn't sure entirely -why-, but at that moment, Rahne made
a snap decision.  She told Kerit what was going on.  Not -all- of it,
but a general snapshot of where she'd last been and more or less what
she'd been doing, and what had happened next.
	"... and then, I woke up here," she finished, shrugging.
	Kerit and Dane looked at each other; Dane nodded.
"Dimensional displacee," said the shorter, broader Salusian.
	"I figure," Kerit agreed.  "Aw, -man-.  The paperwork for that
takes forEVER."
	"So much for our free time today," said Dane glumly.
	Kerit thought about that for a second, then grinned.  "Not
necessarily.  Listen, this game works better with an even number of
players anyway - why not join us?  We can get you squared away with
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when we go on duty."

		     SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, EARTH
			6:07 PM (PACIFIC TIME)

	Charles Xavier was a man renowned among all his acquaintances
for his aplomb.  He wasn't the kind of man who raised his voice or got
excited in almost any situation, no matter how extreme.
	All the same, he couldn't help but express his concern for
life and limb just a bit when Magneto sent their stolen car crashing
through a barricade and then soaring off the end of an incomplete
entry ramp toward the brightly-lit streets of San Diego below.
	Magneto glanced toward his traveling companion as he used his
magnetic powers (which seemed to be regaining their strength nicely
after his initial exhaustion) to slow their plummet and put the car
down neatly on its hoverfield.
	"If you don't like it, Charles," he observed dryly as he aimed
the car into a side street and left the police miles behind, "you're
perfectly welcome to drive."
	Xavier shot his oldest friend and nemesis a dark look, but
hung on grimly to his arm rest and said nothing as Magneto wheeled the
hovercar smartly around a corner and into an even narrower side
street, really little more than an alley.
	"Well," said Lehnsherr with mock gravity as he guided the
vehicle to a stop.  "Much as it pains me to do it, Charles, I think
it's time we parted company with our chariot.  It'll be much too
conspicuous now."

	      /*  Isaac Hayes  "Theme from 'Shaft'"  */

	They weren't much less conspicuous on foot (as it were) - the
tall, aristocratic, elderly but powerfully-built man in the militarily
cut charcoal grey and maroon uniform, his head mostly hidden by a
close-fitting metal helmet, striding along next to the bald-headed,
hawk-nosed man in the ground-effect chair.  Still, they blended
reasonably well into the groups of people - human and otherwise -
thronging the sidewalks of San Diego, celebrating the end of the work
week.
	They wandered without much aim for several minutes, taking
stock of their surroundings.  Eventually, they arrived at an edifice
which, even in these surreal surroundings, they recognized
immediately.
	It was a shopping mall.
	Xavier and Lehnsherr glanced at each other, shrugged, and went
inside.
	The mall was crowded with people as variegated as those
outside, moving here and there in ones and twos and larger groups.
Most of the signs in the mall were legible.  Some were in languages
Xavier and Magneto recognized but couldn't read, and others were
complete mysteries.
	As they moved through one of the mall's corridors, a multiply
pierced teenager in a t-shirt advertising what had to be a rock band
(what else would "the Thrashing Gnoberts" be?) leaned out of one of
the shopfronts and called to Xavier.
	"'Ey!  Bald man!"
	Xavier paused and turned his chair.  "Are you talking to me?"
he said.
	"Yeah," said the teenager, nodding sagely.  "You need spinal
shunt, man?  20 dollar, cheap.  15 more, nanostim treatment for your
legs.  Wheel in, walk out, 2 hour.  Whatta you say?"
	Xavier blinked.  "Er... perhaps some other time, thank you,"
he said.
	"OK, what about retrofit for that clunker you ridin'?" said
the teenage salesman agreeably.  "StarkTech repulsorlift kit, 50
bucks.  Turn you into a pod racer, 20 minutes."  He waggled his
eyebrows.  "Chicks dig it."
	Magneto turned and gave the kid a cold stare.
	"Go back inside your shop, young man," he said calmly, "before
I demonstrate to you the folly of implanting that much metal in your
nose and tongue."
	"OK, man, 's cool," the salesman replied, retreating.
	"Young people," said Magneto with a disgusted shake of his
head.
	Xavier favored him with a bemused little smile as they
proceeded down the concourse toward the center of the mall.
	They stopped at a sort of chrome-rimmed balcony overlooking
the mall's central food court.  There, people sat at small tables
scattered around a large tiled area surrounding a fountain.  Hanging
in the air all around the fountain were holographic display fields
showing what appeared to be the evening news.
	The two men watched silently for several minutes as the
commentator described goings-on on Earth and around a multistellar
polity called the Earth Alliance, then delved into the doings of an
apparently larger country referred to as "the Federation".  Xavier was
only half paying attention to the news by now; his fascinated eyes
kept tracking around the mall itself, taking in the great variation of
the crowd.
	Then, as he turned to look at the flow of people on the upper
level behind them, he noticed the shopfront behind Magneto and smiled.
	"I think, Erik," he said, "it's time we did a little research."

			NEKOMIKOKA, TOMODACHI
			       9:12 PM

	It took Don Griffin only about five minutes to determine that
the Paige Guthrie who had crashed into the Morisatos' yard was, in
fact, from the same now-pocket universe he himself hailed from.  This
was accomplished through the application of a simple instrument which
resembled a walkie-talkie with blinking-lighted arms, and a bit of
hmming, while Paige sat looking bewildered with the blankets bunched
up at her waist.
	Then he pocketed the device, sat down cross-legged on the
floor, put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and
said, "So.  What happened?"
	Paige told him what she knew, which wasn't a hell of a lot;
but by the way he frowned thoughtfully and nodded occasionally, she
got the impression that what she was saying was of more use to him,
perhaps, than to her.
	He listened, and then put a hand on her shoulder and smiled at
her.  "OK.  How do you feel?"
	"Pretty good, considering," she replied.  "Except... "  She
paused, looking troubled, then leaned closer and murmured, "... I
think... my power's gone."
	Don nodded.  "You pushed it pretty hard," he said.  "If I
remember right, you normally only get one power per change."
	Paige nodded.  "I don't remember exactly what I was trying to
do... it's all kind of a blur.  I just remember that it -hurt-... "
She reached up and tugged experimentally at a handful of her long
blonde hair, then winced.  "... and now... nothing."
	"It may not be permanent," Don said reassuringly.  "Many's the
time an X-Man's powers have been disrupted by injury or strain.  They
usually come back to normal on their own.  Once I've sorted this
current mess out, I'll do a full scan and see what I can do for you,
OK?"
	Paige nodded.  "I'd appreciate that.  Thank you."
	Don smiled.  "Get some rest.  I have to see what the TARDIS
can make of the data you've given me."
	He got up, reached down and patted her shoulder again, then
turned and left the room.
	"What do you think?" Kitty asked as she and the Beast followed
him through the living room and out to the TARDIS.
	"I think we might have a problem," Don replied.  He unlocked
the TARDIS and went into the dome-ceilinged white control room with
its 1950s Rocketship Provincial decor, plugged the portable diagnostic
module he'd used on Paige into the control console, and dumped its
data into the main sensor control computer.
	He worked in silence for about five minutes, peering into a
microscope-like viewfinder built into the sensor panel, then stood
back from it with a thoughtful, "Hmph."
	"'Hmph' what?" asked Jubilee, who had followed, along with
Logan and their host, into the control room.
	"We used Magneto as the core of the generator that powered the
vacuum-emboitment charger," said Don.  "I'm not sure of the details -
I'll have to scan -him- for that - but I think what must have happened
is that he picked up an attunement to the CVE in the process.  Paige
said that he was pushing himself hard, stretching his sphere of
influence past its normal limits, when the sky turned orange and
everything got weird."
	"So you figure he's been carrying some kind of resonance with
him this whole time... " Kitty began, and Don nodded.
	"And never pushed himself hard enough to set it off before
now," he said.
	Hank McCoy nodded thoughtfully.  "It's the only idea that fits
the data so far," he agreed.
	"Anyway, I've given the computer the chronosynclastic profile
I got from Paige," Don said.  "It should be able to analyze the logs
and find the arrival points of any others."
	Kitty looked troubled.  "If there are others... do you suppose
the same thing might have happened to them that happened to Paige?"
	"Appearing in space?  I doubt it," Don replied.  "For some
reason, live dimensional displacees tend to gravitate toward habitable
environments, even in a scattering scenario like this one.  Paige only
missed by about 10,000 miles."
	He chuckled.  "The Time Lord archive has a surprising amount
of data about incidents like this," he went on.  "The computer figures
there's about a 1 in 1,000 chance of an error like the one that
happened to Paige - so whoever came along, odds are they're fine."

				TAKKAR
		   CAPITAL CITY OF CARDASSIA PRIME
			   CARDASSIA SECTOR
		      9:25 PM (NEW AVALON TIME)

	On the corner of Derzin Street and Bolya Avenue, in the heart
of downtown Takkar, stands an unassuming grey-brick building, dull and
colorless even by Cardassian standards.  Despite its unprepossessing
appearance, though, this building is one of the most feared in
Cardassian space.  Pedestrians cross to the other side of the square
just to avoid walking past its grim grey facade.  Its address is
spoken in whispers, if at all.
	It is the headquarters of the Obsidian Order, that fearsome
organization which is both intelligence agency and secret police force
to the Cardassian Union.
	Or, rather, it -was-, until today.
	The official histories do not say what destroyed the building
at Derzin and Bolya.  They claim that the building and much of the
surrounding few blocks were leveled by a bomb planted by a dissident
organization, though they are careful not to say which one.
	They say this because the official historians felt that the
true cause of the building's destruction was too bizarre to be
believed by succeeding generations.

	First Prefect Elar Markat stood at the perimeter of the
devastated zone which, until this afternoon, had contained the most
feared building in the Cardassian Union.
	"Situation?" he asked the subaltern standing at the tape with
a portable sensor kit.
	"Sir, the object is moving," the subaltern replied, peering
intently at the monitor panel of his sensor unit.
	"Moving?!" Markat blurted.
	"Yes, sir.  It's still hot from re-entry," the subaltern said,
"but it's definitely moving.  Slowly, only about one tabak per hour,
but... "  He turned to Markat, looking shocked and a bit worried.
"Sir, it's headed this way."
	They heard it before they saw it, a rhythmic "crump... crump...
crump" from the smoke-filled disaster zone, faint at first and growing
stronger.  The sound reminded Markat of the relentless stride of a
Destroid - but what Destroid could survive an unassisted fall from
orbit?
	This was no battlepod landing area; the object which had hit
the Obsidian Order's headquarters had been traveling at meteor speeds.
The sky over Takkar was still grey with dust from the impact, and
would be for days; windows had been broken for miles around by the
shockwave.  Any Destroid which made such a landing would be nothing
more than slag and vapor.
	So what -was- it?
	A moment later, it became dimly visible, a shape moving within
the curtain of smoke that still obscured the impact zone.  As it drew
nearer, Markat, the subaltern, and all the members of the cordon of
armed police on the scene remarked to themselves that it was much
smaller than they had expected.  It was quite large for a -man-, but
to be making such resounding footfalls, they would have expected it to
be much larger.
	A moment later, it emerged from the smoke at the edge of the
cordon, and Markat and his men drew back in shock.
	It was a man, a huge, hulking man dressed in dark red, the
color of dried human blood.  Vast muscles rippled across his frame as
he advanced, his bootsoles crushing the rubble beneath his feet.  His
arms were bare except for some bands of dark-red metal, and at first
glance he appeared to have no head, an illusion created by the
dome-shaped helmet which surmounted his shoulders and nearly matched
them in breadth.  Through three small ports on the front of the
helmet, a pair of eyes and a mouth could be seen, the former narrowed
with annoyance, the latter pressed into a tight, irritated line.
	This creature came nearer, something of the horrible
inevitability of a machine or a glacier in his stride, and then
paused, raised one massive hand, and pointed a thick finger at Markat.
	"You," he said in a deep, rather gravelly man's voice.  "What
are you?  Where the hell am I?"
	Markat blinked - whatever this man was, he spoke the language
of Earth - and summoned his own knowledge of the tongue to reply.
	"You are under arrest for the destruction of Cardassian state
property!"
	The behemoth seemed to find that bemusing; he drew back a
half-step, his upper body tilting to make up for the fact that he
couldn't cock his head in that helmet.
	Then he leaned forward, his masked face tilting down toward
Markat's, and he said through his teeth, "Maybe you didn't HEAR me,
scaleface.  WHERE, AM, I?"
	Markat was proud of himself for not letting his voice quaver
as he leveled his disruptor, thumbed it to full power, and commanded
the monstrous human to remove his helmet and lie down on the ground.
	The giant's scowl deepened further.
	"OK," he said.  "You wanna do it the -hard- way, huh?"  He
cracked his massive knuckles.  "Kind of day I've had?  I'm up for
that."
	He took a step, and Markat fired.  As he did, so did his men,
and the red-clad giant disappeared briefly behind a screen of
disruptor beams which reached a near-blinding intensity.  Nothing
could survive a bombardment like that; even a sheet of starship
tritanium would be burned through by such concentrated fire from the
most powerful hand weapons in the Union.
	A new curtain of smoke, this one generated by the beams
scorching the very air, rose into the air as Markat ordered his troops
to cease fire.
	A moment later, an enormous shape loomed out of the smoke and,
moving much faster than a creature of such bulk should be able to
move, swatted the weapon from his hand with a tremendous backhand.
	The helmeted giant, completely unscathed, picked up First
Prefect Markat by the front of his uniform tunic and hurled him into
the Second Battalion, scattering them like bowling pins, and then
ignored the others completely, turning southward.
	Off in the distance, Cain Marko could see a tall, obvious
building which was, dollars to donuts, some kind of government center.
There would probably be answers there.  It was a good five miles away,
and it seemed like every jerk on this planet was between him and it,
but that didn't matter.
	He might have found the family he'd never realized he wanted
with the X-Men, and his temper might have been moderated, and his love
for mayhem for its own sake might have abated... but Cain would always
enjoy teaching new people the futility of trying to stop the
Juggernaut.

			NEKOMIKOKA, TOMODACHI
			       9:37 PM

	Kitty Griffin was sitting in the courtyard, sipping tea and
chatting with Logan, Jubilee, the Beast, the Morisatos, and Paige,
when Don emerged from the TARDIS looking pleased with himself.
	"Got the first signature lock," he said.  "Back at Zeta Cygni,
believe it or not."
	Kitty put down her teacup, stood up, and brushed at her
jeans.  "Well, I guess we'd better get busy, then," she said.
"Mrs. Morisato, thanks for the tea."
	"Anybody who's up for a reunion, all aboard," said Don
jauntily.  McCoy, Logan, and Jubilee said their farewells and headed
for the TARDIS, but Paige hesitated.
	"Hey, kiddo," said Griffin, noticing.  "Aren't you coming?
I've got plenty of clothes in the TARDIS, we can find you something to
wear."
	Paige looked at her toes.  "I guess not," she said sadly.
	"Why not?" asked Kitty, concern in her voice.  "I thought you
felt better."
	"I feel fine," Paige assured her.  "It's just... I don't think
I'd be much use to you.  If you ran into trouble... I'd just get in
the way without my power."
	Don crossed to her, put his hand on her shoulder, and smiled.
"Our powers aren't what make us X-Men, Paige.  Hell, -my- power
happens all inside my -head-.  And you know, when I first joined the
team, Storm was our leader - and at the time, she didn't HAVE any
powers."  He smiled at a distant memory.  "You should have seen her
whip up on Cyclops in the Danger Room.  Man, that was something to
see."
	Paige's morose expression was cracked by a slight smile at the
image.  "I've seen Sam's photo album from back then," she said.  "That
was during her punk phase, wasn't it?"
	Griffin chuckled.  "Yeah.  It's funny, but even now I always
think of 'Roro with the mohawk first."
	"She's been wearing dreads lately," said Paige.
	"Hm.  I bet that's something to see, too," Don replied with a
grin.

			 HIPSVILLE, FUNKOTRON
		 10:42 AM  (9:42 PM NEW AVALON TIME)

	Like Magneto, Ororo Munroe woke up on asphalt.  Slowly,
painfully, she levered herself upright and took stock of her
situation.
	She thought at first that she was in a courtyard, bounded on
all four sides by a low curb and flooded with sunlight from a
brilliant blue sky above.  Then a bit more of her mind spooled up to
wakefulness and she realized it wasn't a courtyard, it was a rooftop.
	Storm walked to the edge of the roof and looked, and what she
saw momentarily defied her understanding.  Eventually, she realized
that what she was looking at was a field containing a huge crowd of
people.  The field - probably a park of some kind - was across the
street from the building on which she stood, which seemed to be about
three stories high.  Off in the distance, under some trees, she could
see what looked like a stage with an acoustic shell.  The sea of
humanity in the field was facing that way.
	Trying to clear her thoughts, Ororo found a ladder on the side
of the building and climbed down into the alley.  She'd just dropped
to the pavement when she heard someone clear his throat behind her.
	Still a bit jumpy from the situation she'd been in when she
blacked out (never mind the surreality of where she'd awakened), Storm
whirled, the metal weights at the ends of her dreadlocks clacking
gently against each other as they swung.
	There, she saw a man in blue trousers and a tie-dyed blue
shirt.  It took her a moment to realize that the shirt was not a
t-shirt, as was usual for tie-dye, but rather a dressy button-front
shirt with a collar; its original color seemed to have been a pale
blue.  He also had on a peaked cap, tie-dyed in the same colors.
Around his waist he wore a heavy leather belt burdened with equipment
- a flashlight, handcuffs, a holstered pistol - and on his chest,
bright against the tie-dye pattern of his shirt, was a chrome shield.
	... He was a POLICEMAN?
	He grinned at her, showing a couple of gold teeth.
	"Righteous dreads, honeychile," he said in an accent that
struck her as Caribbean (which was a little weird, since he was white,
but it sounded genuine, not put on).  He seemed not at all
disconcerted to have just encountered a white-haired, blue-eyed black
woman in a buckle-festooned black leather jumpsuit and cape climbing
down the fire escape of an apartment building.
	"Lookin' for a better view of the festival, huh?" the tie-dyed
cop went on.  "Probably a pretty good view up there, but the acoustics
ain't shit," he said.  "Not from around here, huh?"
	"No... I'm from New York," said Ororo, figuring that was
safe to say; wherEVER she was, it certainly wasn't New York.
	The cop's grin widened.  "Ahh," he said.  "Earth.  Right on.
You find t'ings be a little different on Funkotron, ya."
	Then, to Ororo's continuing puzzlement, he reached to a pouch
on his belt, handed her a flower, and said, "Have a good time now,
sweet thing," before sauntering off down the street.
	Storm looked at the flower for a moment, then shrugged and
went across the street to the edge of the crowd of people.
	"Excuse me," she said to the first person who looked
relatively normal, a college-age-looking girl in a green tank dress.
"What's going on?"
	The girl looked at Storm in disbelief.  "Don't you KNOW?" she
asked, her voice squeaky with dismay.  "It's only the biggest music
festival of the YEAR, girl!  The Pan-African Folk Funk Fusion
Festival!"
	"Folk... funk... fusion," said Ororo dubiously.
	Before she could say anything more, a wave of cheering swept
over the crowd, followed by the sound of drums.

			NEKOMIKOKA, TOMODACHI
			       9:54 PM

	Don Griffin had been ready to go when he came out and
announced that he had the first fix, fifteen minutes ago.  Urd didn't
know that for an absolute fact, but, from his bearing and that of his
wife, she was pretty sure of it.  He was dubbing around, "refining the
fix," solely to kill some time in hopes that Paige Guthrie would
decide to go with them despite believing that she'd lost her powers.
	Urd smiled to herself and prepared a couple of things she
would need in order to fix that.
	"Oh, Paige?" she said.
	"Yes, Miss - uh, Urd?" Paige responded, amending her statement
in mid-flow as Urd raised an I-told-you-before finger.
	"Bell doesn't like her cat to wander around outside," Urd told
her.  "Would you be a dear and take her in?"
	Paige gave her a rather puzzled look at that - the cat, a fat
calico specimen, didn't seem to be wandering anyplace, but rather lay
on an intact flagstone not far from the entrance to the temple,
apparently asleep.  But Paige's mother raised her right; she was a
guest (and a guest who had made a huge hole in the yard, to boot), so,
asked to do one of her hosts a favor, she did her best to do it.
	She bent down, slipped her hands under the sleeping cat, and
picked it up... or tried to.  It wouldn't budge.  It was as though the
cat was glued to the ground.
	Paige paused for a moment, giving the cat (which remained
serenely unconscious) a puzzled look.  Sure, it was fat, but
-really-.  She tried again; again it wouldn't move.
	Conscious of Urd's gaze, Paige felt her face getting red.
She'd been through quite a bit today, but she didn't -feel- weak,
certainly not so weak that she couldn't lift a cat.  She braced her
feet against the ground on either side of the cat and tried a third
time.  Nothing.
	Gritting her teeth, she tried harder, focusing all her will on
the task.  Her arms strained; a fine sweat broke out on her forehead;
she could feel the muscles in the backs of her legs quivering.
	So focused was Paige on what she was doing that she didn't
notice cracks starting to form in the flagstones under her feet.
	One of the cat's back paws came up a little bit, just barely
clearing the ground; but then Paige relented, letting it back down
with an explosive outrush of breath, and straightened up, rubbing
ruefully at her smarting calf and thigh muscles.
	"I guess it must've hit me harder'n I thought," she mused.  "I
can't even pick up a cat."
	"I'd have been surprised if you had been able to," said Urd
with a smile, "given that Packet weighs about a thousand tons just
now."
	Paige gaped at her.  "... What?"
	"A simple spell," Urd said.  With a dismissive wave, she
released the cat from the enchantment, at which point it awoke,
blinked a little blearily around, and then strolled into the house.
	"A... thousand tons?" Paige murmured, looking down at her
hands.  Only then did she notice the cracks in the flagstones where
she'd had her feet braced.  "Wow."
	"Hey, speaking of magic," said Urd offhandedly, "would you
like to get a better look at your divot?"
	"Beg pardon?" said Paige, coming back from her reverie.
	"I said would you like to get a better look at your divot?"
asked Urd, gesturing to the crater.
	"Uh... sure," said Paige.
	Urd smiled and handed her a pebble.  "Here.  It's called a
flightstone.  You're a smart kid, you can probably figure out what it
does from the name."
	Paige regarded the little rock dubiously.  "This rock makes
you fly?"
	Urd nodded.  "Would I lie to you?" she said with an
emerald-eyed wink.  "Just hold it in your hand and think of flying.
It's easy once you get the hang of it."
	"Won't someone see me?"
	The white-haired goddess laughed.  "Takes more than a flying
girl to interest -our- neighbors," she said.  "G'wan, have a look."
	Paige gave her an uncertain look, then closed her hand around
the pebble and took on a thoughtful expression.
	After a moment, she seemed to lighten, coming up on tiptoe;
then she separated from the ground entirely and floated into the air.
A smile crossed her face as she got accustomed to the sensation, and
before long she'd ventured up to about a hundred feet, where she could
get a good view of the crater she'd left in the Morisatos' yard.
	Hardly seems possible, she thought, that I could have made
that and lived.  Colossus, maybe, or Juggernaut... or Sam... but me?
What did I -do- to myself?
	On the ground, Jubilation Lee came up next to Urd, and the two
stood watching Paige explore the air.  Jubilee chuckled, thinking that
her friend resembled Wendy from "Peter Pan", flitting around the night
sky barefoot in that long flannel nightshirt.  Then she leaned toward
Urd, not taking her eyes off Paige, and said,
	"You picked that rock up off the ground about a minute before
you gave it to her."
	"Of course I did," Urd replied, also without looking.  She
smiled and added, "You think she'd have tried it if I'd just said, 'I
think you can fly'?"
	Jubilee smirked.  "Point," she said.  "All the same... I never
liked power crutches," she added.  Then she cupped her hands around
her mouth and yelled, "Hey, HAYSEED!  That's just an ordinary ROCK!"
	Paige paused in flight, looked down, wobbled a little, and
called down, "What?"
	"There ain't no magic pebble, Paige!" Jubilee yelled back,
grinning broadly.  "You're FLYIN'!"
	Paige recoiled in surprise, and in doing so, lost her
concentration.  With a cry of dismay, she fell the hundred feet to the
ground, slamming down on the paving stones a few yards from the edge
of her crater with a heavy THUD.
	Then she sat up, shook her head, and gave Jubilee a dirty
look.
	"That was -totally- uncool, Mallrat," she growled.
	"Oh, what," Jubilee replied, unconcerned, as she stuck out a
hand to help her old classmate to her feet.  "Like you'd'a survived
makin' THAT," she went on, angling a thumb over her shoulder at the
crater, "if you weren't invulnerable."
	Paige dusted off her nightshirt, tried to sustain her scowl,
then gave up and grinned.
	"I guess you have a point," she said.
	Don Griffin emerged from the TARDIS, looking puzzled.  "What
was that yell?" he asked.
	"Oh, nothing," said Jubilee innocently.
	Paige crossed to him and said, "If you don't mind,
Mr. Griffin, I think I'll come with you after all."
	Don grinned.  "'Course I don't mind.  Delighted," he said.
"There's only one rule."
	"What's that?"
	"If you're coming along, you have to call me Don.  C'mon,
Jubilation, we're about ready to go.  Where's Logan?"

	Five minutes' worth of goodbyes and thank-yous later, the
TARDIS vanished from the corner of the Morisatos' yard, and Keiichi
yawned and mentally turned the page on another weird day in the life.
	"What a nice young couple," said Belldandy.  "I do hope we see
them again."
	"Who?" asked Urd with a grin.  "Don and Kitty, or Paige and
Jubilee?"
	Bell flashed her elder sister a look of tolerant reproach.
"Urd, -really-," she said, and then turned and went into the house.

			SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
			7:17 PM (PACIFIC TIME)

	With all the strange changes in the future world he found
himself in, Charles Xavier was strangely comforted by the fact that
Indigo bookstores hadn't changed.  Well, they had in a way; they sold
a lot of data solids in addition to old-fashioned books, and the decor
was sleeker, more modern.  But the places still had books, and they
still didn't mind if you hung around browsing through them without
buying anything.
	He and Magneto had spent the last hour and change in the
history section, leafing through books about the Telepath Problem and
the history of the galaxy.  With the limited supply of local currency
Lehnsherr had 'acquired' along with the car, they'd been able to buy
only a newspaper and one volume for later perusal, but Xavier had
found a good volume.
	Now they sat at one of the tables in the food court, eating
nachos (all they had the change for after buying the book) and
flipping through a volume appropriately entitled "So You've Just
Arrived from a Parallel Universe".
	At first, upon spotting it on the shelf, Xavier had assumed
this book was a joke, some kind of humor work.  Having read the first
chapter, though, he now realized that though it -did- contain a good
deal of humor, it was in total earnest about its subject matter.
	The realization, and its following implications, struck Xavier
deeply, and he sat for several minutes in thought, watching the mall
patrons come and go, while Magneto thumbed through the book.
	"Look at this, Erik," he mused quietly after a few moments.
"This goes beyond the peaceful coexistence of humans and mutants.
These people are part of a fully integrated -galactic society-!"
	Magneto nodded, making a rumbling sound that might have been
agreement.  Then, though, he gestured soberly to one of the holopanels
above them and said,
	"It's not quite a utopia, though, is it."
	Xavier looked, and there on the screen was a cadre of men and
women clad in severe black uniforms.  They each had a golden badge
inscribed with the Greek letter Psi, and they were escorting a
bleary-eyed, clearly drugged man in a grey prisoner's coverall and
manacles down a tiled corridor somewhere.
	The voiceover lauded the Psi Corps enforcement team's capture
of Marcus Warren, the infamous renegade Psi Cop and leader of one of
Europe's biggest telepath terrorist cells, while scrolling text
detailed Warren's crimes, which included helping an estimated two
hundred telepaths avoid mandatory conscription into the Corps.
	The piece was followed by an advertisement for the Corps -
concerned parents being told by a calm-faced man in black that their
teenage son was a telepath, the boy being taken from his home and
taught to use his power for the Good of Mankind, eventually becoming a
steadfast, black-clad sentinel of justice.  The message was clear -
trust the Psi Corps, we're your friends - but there was something so
ineffably sinister about the whole thing that Xavier's blood felt cold
in his veins just watching it.
	"Remind you of anything?" Magneto asked in a softly ironic
tone.  "One wonders if the man responsible for this 'Psi Corps' was
named Kelly."
	Xavier grunted noncommittally, still intent on the screen.
	"At any rate," Magneto went on, "if they track and arrest
unregistered telepaths with such zeal, and they have any reliable way
of detecting them, then we have have a serious problem.  We should get
off this planet as soon as we can."
	Xavier came back to himself with a start.  "Yes," he agreed,
looking a bit shaken.  "We should."
	"According to this," said Magneto, tapping the newspaper, "it
appears that there is someone who bears a remarkable resemblance to
Don Griffin in charge of a law enforcement organization that promotes
peace and welfare, and is not particularly well-liked by the Psi
Corps."
	As if summoned by Magneto's mention of the name, a man in the
black, gold-badged uniform of the Psi Corps walked past the table
carrying a tray of food.  He gave the Master of Magnetism's helmet a
curious glance, but he was mostly engrossed in thoughts of his
impending lunch, and paid the two no further mind as he went to an
empty table about halfway across the court and sat.
	Once he'd gone, Magneto gave him an ironic glance, then turned
back to Xavier and continued, "Perhaps we should try to find a way to
reach this... Babylon 6."

			      THE TARDIS
			 INTERSTITIAL VORTEX
		 10:24 PM (RELATIVE NEW AVALON TIME)

	Don looked up from monitoring the TARDIS's navigational
instruments when the double doors leading deeper into the timeship's
interior opened and Jubilee emerged, looking triumphant.
	"OK, Griffin, you need to index those clothes rooms better.
This is the best I could do in half an hour of digging.  It'll do for
now, I guess."
	As Jubilee spoke, Paige emerged from the corridor into the
control room, a slightly self-conscious smile on her lips, and struck
a half-hearted pose to model the clothes she and Jubilee had found in
the TARDIS's vast banks of costumery.
	The outfit was a two-piece steel-blue number made of some
material midway between fabric and leather in texture, a knee-length
panel-fronted skirt and a jacket-like top with a notch collar, both
sporting ribbed fabric inserts on the sides and classy gold piping.
It looked like a uniform, though not one that most of the viewers
recognized - except Don.
	"Ah," he said.  "I see you found the Kryptonian section.
That's actually a traffic policewoman's uniform, but it's about 500
years out of date, so I wouldn't worry.  It looks good on you, and
it'll be plenty tough enough to keep up with you."
	"It's a start," Jubilee admitted, "but it needs more work."
	"I think it looks fine," Paige said.
	"That's because you're a hayseed from Kentucky," Jubilee
replied dismissively.
	"West Virginia."
	"Whatever."
	Don chuckled and turned his attention to the control board as
a light started flashing.  "All right, here we are!  First stop, CFA
New Orleans."  He worked a couple of controls, and the Time Rotor in
the center of the control console slowed, then stopped.  The bright
electric arc inside it went out as it stopped, silencing the low,
throbbing buzz that always filled the room when the timeship was in
motion.
	"OK.  For those of you who haven't been here before: The New
Orleans is a large spaceship," Don said, bringing up a hologram of the
vessel on a display, "which represents the heart of the nomadic nation
known as the Confederate Freespacers Alliance.  It's just under two
miles long and a bit more than half a mile thick, and at any given
time there's about a hundred thousand people on it.  Think of it as a
flying shopping mall-slash-bazaar."
        "Sounds like the Mallrat would be right at home," Paige noted,
shooting a little grin across the console at Jubilee, who pretended to
be annoyed.
        "In some parts, yes," Don said.  "Think of it as being sort of
like Cairo.  There's some fancy districts, there's a huge Bazaar...
and there's also some very, very bad parts, places people shouldn't
even live, where things can be very dangerous for the unwary."
        "And which part are we going to?"
	"We're landing in the Bazaar - it's the easiest place to find
your way back to.  I couldn't get an exact fix, so we'll have to do a
little hunting the old-fashioned way," said Griffin.  "The Bazaar
itself is relatively safe, but keep your eyes open, boys and girls;
this place can get a little rough."

        A left, two rights, a left, an up three lefts, two rights, a
left, a right, a down, a counterclockwise, left, right, left... well,
Bobby had lost track of the turnings, and of everything else for that
matter.  Now and again he'd passed close to the sounds of heavy
traffic - feet, wheels, engines, loud humming things- but most of the
time he was separated from them by a bulkhead.  Or hull.  Whatever.
        Once he'd come out of the system entirely, overlooking a vast,
brightly lit space with a green floor, or so it appeared at that
distance.  From over a hundred feet up, he could see hundreds,
thousands of people, walking in and out of storefronts, walking,
lounging and playing on the field below.  Above him ran catwalks with
little kiosks like one could see in a mall running down the center.
Vehicles floated in and out of huge corridors, pushing slowly through
the people, many loaded with what were unmistakably cardboard boxes.
        Even at a hundred feet above the ground... floor... deck...
thingy... Bobby could pick out at least a dozen different races.  Just
like in that shantytown, only more prosperous, he thought.  A large
number - but not the majority, not quite - appeared human, although
some figures, like the huge blimp of a man moving effortlessly through
the thickest crowd, stretched the definition.  Others resembled
walking shag rugs, or nearly-burned pan pizzas, not to mention every
variation on the humanoid form Bobby could think of offhand.
        Unfortunately, he couldn't get -down- without causing a scene.
There was no ladder, no access port, no nothing that he could spot.  A
catwalk ran about thirty feet over his head, but it didn't seem any
more inviting.  He supposed he could get down with one of his
old-fashioned ice slides, but he wasn't sure, cosmopolitan though this
society obviously was, how much of a stir that would cause.  Finally
he gave it up, returning to the warren of vents and tunnels in hopes
of finding a less conspicuous way out.
        More rights, more lefts, more ups and downs.  The gray vents
were beginning to blur in Bobby's mind.  One light after another, some
working, some not, passed over his head.  One step after another
echoed around his ears, the monotonous sound broken only by the
occasional creaking panel or even less occasional sound of movement on
the other side of a wall.
        After about an hour of this, Bobby was ready to bag it all and
ask directions when he saw a loose vent panel punched halfway into the
passage.  A quick peek through the grate showed a broad, well-lit area
on the other side, with nobody in sight.  A quick blast of ice smashed
out the panel, and Bobby crawled through the gap into a room that, by
comparison, was brightly lit, clean, and apparently safe-looking.
        Unfortunately, appearances can be deceiving.
        "Good evening, Mr... Iceman, was it?" a voice called from the
back of the chamber.  From a small enclosed office area emerged a
young man, younger than Bobby - perhaps as young as Paige Guthrie, the
youngest X-Man these days.  Bobby wondered briefly what had become of
her and all the others when whatever had happened had happened, hoped
they were OK, and then returned his attention to the man who'd
addressed him.
	That individual wore what appeared, against all probability,
to be a snappy, form-tailored business suit, right down to the striped
tie and gleam-shined black patent oxfords.  His brown layer-cut hair
bounced with each step, and green eyes stared over a grim, cruel
smile.  Behind him walked the obligatory brace of bodyguards, tall,
square-jawed, neckless and dark.
        "You made quite an impression upon my subordinates,
Mr. Iceman," the young gentleman said.  "However, I have spent the
last two years rebuilding the presence my grandfather lost forty years
ago.  I'm afraid I cannot permit a vigilante to interfere with my
business at this critical stage of affairs."
        "Excuse me?" Bobby said.
        "Of course, after the remarkable demonstration of your
abilities you gave my subordinates," the young man said, "I will not
waste more of my valuable resources in futile attempts to eliminate - "
        "EXCUSE me... " Bobby said, icing up.  "Who -are- you anyway?"
        The young man blinked.  "You haven't heard of me?"
        "No."  Bobby folded his arms over each other.  "I'm new here,
or haven't you heard?"
        "I see," the young man nodded.  "I am Justinian Lynch,
grandson and heir of the late Roman Lynch."  When this failed to bring
any reaction, he said a bit more pointedly, "The -crime boss- Roman
Lynch."  After a moment, he lost his cool altogether.  "The legendary
INTERSTELLAR crime boss Roman Lynch!  Ruler in shadows of a hundred
filthy cities and owner of a thousand slave ships!  He died in
Tantalus four years ago!  Does -that- jog your memory?!?"
        "Afraid not... oh, wait," Bobby said, "those goons I beat up
mentioned a 'young Mister Lynch.'  That'd be you, wouldn't it?"
        "YES... I mean," Justinian said, restoring himself to calm,
self-assured superiority, "my associates do like to use that term of
endearment when speaking of me.  But anyway," he continued, gesturing
to the doorway, "now that you've been edified as to my identity and
ancestry, it's time for you to die."
        "I thought you said you weren't going to waste any more
resources on me."
        "-Valuable- resources," Justinian said, snapping his fingers.
Two more goons rolled in a woman in a straitjacket, head encased in a
black hood with small breathing vents.  "This young lady, although
promising at first, has proved impossible to control for any length of
time.  And yet I put off having her disposed of, hoping that I could
find some use for her talents."
	One of the goons attending the woman strapped to the handcart
drew a small folding case from his breast pocket, presenting it to
Justinian, who flipped it open to reveal a syringe.
        "Stimulant," Justinian said, taking the needle in his hands.
"Ms. Thermopeles spends most of her time under very heavy sedation."
With a careful hand Justinian punched the needle through the
straitjacket and injected its contents into the arm of the wearer.
Almost immediately the woman began to squirm and buck against the
restraints, and the attendants stepped away from the cart with
surprising alacrity.
        Justinian sighed, and with a gesture he dismissed his men to
flee the chamber.  "You'll forgive me if I make this introduction
brief," he said, gesturing to the smoke rising from the restraints.
With a roar the straps of the straitjacket burst into flames, and in
moments hands covered in orange fire scrabbled at the back of the hood
for the zipper.
        The face, revealed, rattled Bobby to the core.  A broad,
puckered scar ran down the left cheek from ear to chin.  Metal studs
poked through both eyebrows.  The matted black hair was cut into
clumps, hanging long here, showing bare scalp there.  Worst of all was
the large eyes, deep and the same light blue as Iceman's current
frozen physique... the eyes that seemed to stare at two things at
once, seeing things that weren't there for ordinary people to view.
        "Miss Phoebe Thermopeles," Justinian smirked, "please say
hello to Mr. Iceman."
        Thermopeles giggled, a shrill, edgy giggle that set off every
alarm in Bobby's head.  Arcade had a laugh like that; so had a lot of
other people Bobby had helped take down, usually with great pain and
danger to life and limb.
        "Mr. Iceman, I present you Miss Phoebe Thermopeles."  With
that Justinian stepped backwards towards the door.  "I hope you two
will get on swimmingly, but I have an alibi to establish, so..."
Three more steps brought Justinian to the door, and he opened it, his
smile vanishing, and his smooth voice turning hard and cold:
        "Thermopeles... KILL."
	The door slammed behind him.

  /*  Prodigy  "Firestarter (instrumental)"  _wip3'0ut" XL OST_  */

        Thermopeles raised a pair of flaming hands, giggling and
shaking head to toe, those eyes staring at the figure of solid ice
before her.
        Iceman struck first, and hard, blasting the woman with ice,
slamming her back against the back wall and encasing her in solid ice
of over two feet's thickness.  He poured it on, stopping only when he
was certain that any mutant flame power would be neutralized.  Only
Thermopeles' head remained clear; Bobby wasn't willing, just yet, to
kill, although hypothermia would probably do that in about five
minutes.
        Thermopeles giggled again, and suddenly Iceman was -aflame-.
He howled with agony as heat, primal, penetrating heat, ate away his
body.  The flame stopped, and he collapsed, curled up, shivering as
his power worked to restore him.  Against the wall, despite a serious
nosebleed, Thermopeles giggled and giggled, her hands glowing under
the rapidly cracking ice shell.
        Bobby just had time to see her burst free from the ice shell
before the flames returned again, stronger than ever...

	By the time anyone from the TARDIS located the fight, it had
moved down a corridor and into a large, dilapidated two-level room
which even Bobby, non-spacer that he was, would probably have
recognized as a shuttlebay if he hadn't been so busy trying not to get
killed.
	His problem was simple: Phoebe Thermopeles was so crazy that
she didn't feel pain, so even punching a lance of ice through her
fiery defenses and into her shoulder, as he had managed to do, didn't
register on her at all.  He, on the other hand, was quite sane, and so
every time she, say, melted off one of his hands, that hurt like a
sonofabitch.
	It was relatively easily -repaired-, thanks to the new level
he'd taken his powers to recently; but his endurance couldn't keep up
with that level of damage forever, and eventually he wouldn't be able
to restore himself anymore.  Conscious of this, he'd changed his
strategy, throwing up shields (which she almost instantly reduced to
vapor) and trying to get any sort of cover he could find.
	It kind of reminded him of fighting Pyro, the flamethrower-
wielding member of the Brotherhood of Mutants, except Pyro couldn't
-create- fire, only control it, which was why he wore the
flamethrower.  If you could get the flamethrower -away- from him, or
screw it up somehow, he'd be about as dangerous as any random guy off
the street.
	This chick was different.  She was a -true- pyrokinetic, and
either her gift or some outside factor had crushed her mind like an
empty beer can.  She was throwing flame around like there was no
tomorrow, without any sort of regard for conserving her strength.
Bobby figured his only hope at this point was to see if he could get
her to wear herself out - though she certainly didn't show any signs
of slowing down so far.
	Bobby risked a glance above his latest cover, which seemed to
be some kind of overturned cargo container.  Yep, she was still there,
still giggling inanely while fire crackled in her hair.  Spotting him,
she gathered light in her hand and prepared to throw it at him -
	- when a bolt of yellow-white fire, much brighter and denser
than the orange-red stuff she was chucking around, shot out of the
corridor behind her and struck her full in the back.
	Thermopeles had gotten quite accustomed to the idea that fire
couldn't hurt her; so when the lash of flame struck her and caused the
nerves of her back to light up, she screamed as though cut with a
sword, more out of surprise and shock than actual pain.
	The hell? thought Bobby as his opponent whirled to confront
this new threat.
	A small, bat-winged form swooped out of the corridor, circled
Thermopeles, and spat another gout of yellow-white fire at her.  Bobby
Drake came involuntarily to his feet, his icy jaw dropping.
	"LOCKHEED!" he cried.
	Thermopeles screamed in outrage and unleashed her most
powerful bolt yet, but the little purple dragon avoided it with almost
contemptuous ease, his aerial agility more than a match for his
deranged foe's aim.  The blast, powerful and coherent enough to hit
with physical force, whipped through the spot where the dragon had
been to slam into the far wall of the room, denting it soundly.
	From up above, on the balcony-like catwalk ringing the room's
second level, a familiar voice called a hail:
	"Bobby!  Looks like you can use some help!"
	Drake looked up - and saw a figure out of his past, the
trenchcoated shape of Don Griffin, waving at him.  Next to Don was 
a big blue shape Bobby didn't recognize.
        "Not necessary!" Iceman replied flippantly.  "I have
everything under contrAAAAAAAAGH!!"
	The last word blurred into a scream because Thermopeles had
successfully put Lockheed out of what passed for her mind momentarily,
then engulfed Bobby once again in flames.
	He staggered backward, his back banging against the overturned
remains of a shuttlecraft.  Dammit!  Didn't notice that was back
there! he thought to himself as he struggled to reconstitute himself
as fast as Thermopeles's flames were eating at him.
	A moment later, he felt a very peculiar sensation and fell
backward through the shuttlecraft hulk.  The flames didn't come with
him, and the resulting relief almost made him gasp out loud.
	He sprawled on the deck behind the hulk, then blinked up into
a familiar, smiling, masked face.
	"Kitty!" he blurted.
	"Hi, Bobby," said Shadowcat.  "I see your taste in girlfriends
hasn't improved."
	"That's not funny," Iceman grumped as he got to his feet and
brushed away the charred remains of his jacket.  "The hell are you
doing here?  I thought you were trapped forever in a parallel...
dimension," he added, his face going blank with comprehension as he
completed the sentence.
	Kitty touched her nose and grinned.  "Hold that thought.  So
who's your friend?"
	"Beats me," said Bobby.  "I'm not even sure who I pissed off
to get saddled with her."
	"Well, I guess we'd better go shut her down before she does
any more damage, not that this place would ever know the difference,"
said Shadowcat.  "You ready?"
	Iceman took a moment to gather up his concentration and freeze
himself down a little harder, putting the sharpest possible edges on
his faceted surface.
	"Let's do it," he said with a little smile.
	"That's a new look for you," Kitty observed conversationally
as they prepared to round the shuttle.
	"It's a long story," Bobby replied, and then they were around
the nose of the shuttle hulk and headed back into the thick of things.
	As they did so, and as Thermopeles turned to face them,
something made a very ominous creaking noise.
	Thermopeles let out another of those high-pitched, maddening
giggles, blasted the dented wall again, and then turned, ducked
another burst of counterfire from Lockheed, and sprinted down the
corridor she and Iceman had entered through.
	"Ah, let her go," Bobby said disgustedly as Kitty tensed to
give chase.  "Even -you- would never find her in the freakin' maze
that's on the other end of that hallway."
	Lockheed came to the same conclusion; with a last blast of
fire after the retreating form, he winged over and settled, a little
smugly, on Kitty's shoulder.
	"I guess you showed -her-," said Kitty indulgently, chucking
the dragon under the chin.
	"Hrzfrgnt," Lockheed replied, his body language clearly
translating the statement to, "Damn RIGHT."
	As Don and the blue guy climbed down from the upper level,
Bobby reverted to human form just before the Time Lord grabbed his
hand and threw an arm around him.
	"Bobby DRAKE," he said as they ran through their old Xavier's
School Secret Handshake.  "What's up, my MAIN. MAN.  My dawg.  My ace
in the hole!"
	"Don, it's great to see you," Drake replied, grinning.  "Some
of us thought you were dead."
	"And by 'some of us' you mean Scott," said Don wryly.
	"Yeah, well... "  Bobby shrugged, then turned to the blue
lion-looking guy.  "Hi, I don't think I know you.  I'm Bobby Drake,
Iceman."
	The lion-man looked offended.  "'I don't think I know you,'"
he said, in a voice Bobby recognized quite well, though it had
acquired a sort of growly, rumbly undertone since he last heard it.
"You stay up until midnight every night for a month to help a man pass
pre-calculus, and this is how well he remembers you."
	"Hank?  HANK?!  What the hell happened to you?  I mean, you
look -cool-, but - "
	The Beast smiled - at least, Bobby thought it was a smile -
and gave a rumbling chuckle.  "It's a long story," he said.  "I'll
tell you sometime.  In the mean time, are you all right?"
	"Sure, thanks to these two," said Drake, gesturing to Kitty,
who bowed with a little smile, and Lockheed, who kept looking smug.
	Bobby ruffled his short brown hair, let out a sigh, and added,
"I'm just glad she didn't manage to punch a hole in this wall.
Bulkhead.  Hull.  Thingy."
	The Beast rummaged in his top pocket, perched a pair of
pince-nez atop his muzzle, and and examined that feature of the room
carefully.
	"Actually, Robert," he said, a touch uncomfortably, "that is
not a wall, nor a bulkhead, nor a hull.  That is what we space and
time travelers commonly refer to as a -door-."
	The damaged door gave out another one of those ominous
creaking noises, much louder this time.
	Bobby blinked and looked at Don.
        "And that means... " he said in an I-don't-think-I-like-that
voice.
	Kitty glanced at Don, who grabbed her hand with one of his and
put his other hand on the Beast's shoulder.  Kitty seized Bobby's arm
with her free hand, and they all sank through the floor and into the
safety of the service duct beneath...
	... about two seconds before the docking bay was vented to
space by the total, catastrophic failure of its main bay door.

	Up on a better-repaired level, unaware that the rest of the
TARDIS crew had found what they were looking for, Jubilation Lee led a
slightly bewildered Paige Guthrie through the bazaar of the New
Orleans.
	Paige was slightly bewildered because, although she was a
well-traveled and open-minded young woman, she had never seen such a
teeming diversity of sentient life as this place.  Understandably, she
kept trying to stop and take it all in; but Jubilee was a girl on a
mission and she'd seen it before, and so she kept catching hold of
Paige's hand and half-dragging her along.
	"Come -on-, Hayseed," she grumbled impatiently as Paige paused
again, this time to blink in astonishment at a street performer - a
guy about the size of a horse who seemed to be juggling small anvils.
"'S'not polite to stare, anyway."
	"He's a -performer-," Paige replied as she let herself be
pulled along.  "His -job- is to be stared at."
	"Well, we got other things to do," said Jubilee, not to be
deterred.
	"Ain't we supposed to be looking for someone?"
	"Logan'll sniff us out if he needs us.  C'mon, c'mon, where is
it - there!" she said, her face lighting up.  With an extra surge of
energy, she half-hauled the unprotesting blonde through the fringe of
a crowd in front of a kiosk dealing in some kind of fried food
(judging by the smell), then pulled up in front of one of the proper
storefronts along the edge of the enormous room.
	DERU-VAL and SONS, the sign above the door read, TAILORS.
FINE, DURABLE CLOTHING for ANY SIZE or SHAPE.  ALTERATIONS.
	Jubilee took a small object resembling a high-tech stopwatch
out of her shorts pocket, clicked a button on it, read the resulting
display, and grinned.
	"OK, Guthrie," she said.  "Let's get you presentable."
	"I'm presentable now - " Paige protested, but she was herded
into the shop all the same.

	"Should we report that, uh, depressurized docking bay to
somebody?" asked Bobby Drake as he and the others found their way back
to the TARDIS's landing area.  "And what about what's-her-name and the
crimeboss kid?"
	"Already taken care of," Kitty told him.  "I just talked to de
Vries up in the New Orleans Field Office.  Bluesuiters down in Sector
447 bagged her trying to burn through a bulkhead into a residential
district."
	Bobby looked relieved, but puzzled.  "At least she won't be
barbecuing any random passers-by.  But I've been here the whole time,"
he said, "and you haven't talked to anybody."
	"Well, no," Kitty admitted, "'talked' isn't really the right
word, but for simplicity's sake, that's what we call it."  As they
walked, she pulled apart the junction of her jacket sleeve and glove
and showed him her Lens.
	"Whoa," said Bobby as he got his first glimpse of one of the
techno-mystic gems.  "That's - you're... "  He shook his head.  "What
-is- that?"
	"You'll understand in a bit," the Beast told him.  "In the
meantime - ah, here we are."
	They rounded the corner, and there was the TARDIS.  Logan was
leaning against it, arms folded, enjoying a cigar (which wouldn't burn
inside the vehicle).
	"I was about to tell you that Drake isn't in the inhabitable
levels and my sources say he's marked for death by an underlevel crime
boss," Logan said, "but I see you already know that."
	"Yeah, we pieced it together from context," said Kitty wryly.
"Where are the girls?"
	Logan shrugged.  "Probably still shoppin'.  Lee ditched me
about five minutes in, which is about right.  I'm figurin' on another
half-hour before I go lookin'."
	"Nice to see you too, Logan," said Bobby dryly.  "You know
some of these guys owe you image royalties?"
	Logan cracked a half-smile.  "Already tried," he said.  "Too
late, though.  Term entered common usage back in the 21st."
	Drake blinked.  "What year is it?" he asked.
	"2407," said Hank McCoy.  "We may as well go inside and wait,
and while we're waiting, there's something you should read."

	Bobby was only about halfway through Chapter 1 of "So You've
Just Arrived from a Parallel Universe" when the TARDIS doors opened
again.
	"Hey, Cold Miser," said Jubilee cheerfully.  "I see they found
you."
	"Hey, kid," said Bobby, putting the book aside so he could get
up and give her a hug.  "You're looking good."
	Jubilee smirked.  "I drink milk," she said.
	"That's... not what I meant, but OK," said Bobby, a little
rattled - it HAD been five very important years since he'd last seen
her.
	She snickered and said, "Anyway, nobody's gonna pay any
attention to me in a minute.  Ladies and gentlemen, mutants of all
ages, I give you the all-new, all-stylin' Paige Guthrie, with couture
assistance by yours truly!"
	So saying, Jubilee turned and gestured to the TARDIS doors
with a flourish.  For a moment, nothing happened.  Then, just as
Jubilee was starting to look a little annoyed and might have been
about to say something else, Paige came in, looking more self-
conscious than before.
	She was still wearing the vintage Kryptonian traffic cop's
uniform Jubilee had found in the TARDIS's wardrobe room, but it had
been... -abbreviated- was the best word Don could think of.  The
skirt, originally knee-length, had been shortened somewhat - which
would, admittedly, make it easier to move around in - and so had the
jacket, which had been shorn of its sleeves and cut neatly back to
leave her midriff bare.
	Over it, Paige wore a scarlet coat in a similar style, a
unique garment with the shoulders and overcape of a drover,
three-quarter-length heavy-cuffed sleeves, the waist-length notched
front of a cutaway and the slightly belled tail of a cassock.  It had
similar ribbed inserts in its sleeves and the same gold piping.
	Somewhere amidst the infinity of bits and bobs available in
the Bazaar, she and Jubilee had found some accessories to set this
ensemble off: low, soft boots that matched the skirt, a pair of
cuff-wristed gloves that matched the coat, and a jingly loop of golden
chain which hung from her belt.  Don noted with a smile that the belt
sported the familiar circle-X buckle design.  A person really -could-
find just about anything on the Bazaar.
	"Well," said Don with a grin, "you certainly look less like a
500-year-old Kryptonian traffic cop."
	"Yeah, that's good," Kitty agreed.  "A little daring, but
still classy."
	"You think so?" Paige wondered, smoothing the front of the
modified uniform top.  "I'm not sure.  Jubilee talked me into it."
	"Paige, Paige, Paige," said Jubilee with an air of exaggerated
patience.  "You're all grown up now, girl."  Smacking the back of her
hand lightly against her friend's taut stomach (which was indeed, Don
thought, worthy of display - damn, the last time I saw Paige, she was
just starting to come out of that Guthrie Gawky Phase), she added in a
gentle parody of Paige's soft West Virginia drawl, "It's time to
-flaunt- what God gave you."
	"Well... maybe," Paige said, a little dubious yet.  She held
out a hand and smoothed the sleeve of her red coat.  "I do love the
coat, though."
	Don shared a look with Kitty - they grow up so fast - and then
bent to the scanner eyepiece again.
	A few minutes later, he announced the next fix, and the TARDIS
left the New Orleans Bazaar behind.

			   UNKNOWN LOCATION
		       11:07 PM NEW AVALON TIME

        Everything seemed so foggy, so unreal... and so painful.
        Jean Grey couldn't remember the last time she'd hurt so... no,
she could, she could see it around her, the burning cockpit of the
orbital shuttle.  She could feel the grip of the flight yoke under her
fingers, her burning fingers... she could feel the radiation pouring
through that unshielded cockpit through her body.
        For the moment, her telekinetic powers shielded her from the
worst of the cosmic rays.  TK couldn't stop it all, though, and enough
poured through to sap her strength, make her dizzy and sleepy... so
sleepy...
        Jean shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts.  She had to
get the shuttle into atmosphere.  The others depended on her.  None
of them could withstand this level of radiation for thirty minutes,
those thirty critical minutes needed to enter the safe insulating
blanket of air surrounding the Earth.
        Neither could Jean Grey.
        Through the fog of her mind she realized that she had done
this before, that this was a dream-memory of some kind... that any
moment, the semi-intelligent natural force known as the Phoenix would
appear to her, offer to join itself to her...
        ... but it wasn't there.  Jean could feel the hole, the loss
of something she'd barely paid any mind to.  She'd been cut off from
the Phoenix.  It was not here.
        But it had to be here!  The Phoenix was a universal force of
destruction and rebirth!  It had to be there somewhere!  If she could
only reach - off there, somewhere, she thought she could see it -
        Something bit into the flesh of her left arm, and the pain
spiralled away.  For a moment Jean's dreaming mind struggled to hold
the dream together, only to yield in relief as both pain and dream
ended.

        "Okay, she's back under again.  Did you get anything?"
        "Not a thing.  Like probing tritanium."
        "Well, I think any further probes should be postponed until we
finish stabilizing her.  She's still a little hypothermic from her
snow bath."
        "Not a chance.  Zurich is sending an expert over to take over.
They're really anxious about this."
        "In this weather?  They must not like this expert!"
        "Listen, this person is obviously a powerful and trained
telepath if her shields hold up under continuous probes while
unconscious.  She appears out of nowhere within the perimeter of
Earth's most secure Psi Corps detention facility wearing combat gear.
Headquarters want to know everything about her, and they want it
yesterday."
        "All right, all right, so we keep probing her.  But -you- are
going to go take a rest.  Doctor's orders."
        "This is -my- prison, doctor, and - "
        "And you're risking backlash if you keep pushing yourself.
The Corps doesn't want its children burning out their talents."
        "The Corps is mother, the Corps is father."
        "You betcha.  Now go get some chicken soup, sit down, get a
blanket over you... I hear there's a fine show on the holovid
tonight."
        "All right, all right, I'm going.  I'll send in Fulke in a bit
to continue the probes.  Keep it up until the man from Zurich
arrives."
        "Whenever that is.  I hope he enjoys our fine summer weather."

			SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
			 8:21 PM PACIFIC TIME

	Charles Xavier sat by the far back-corner booth in a dimly
lit spaceport restaurant called the Flightline Cafe, keeping an eye on
the place's thin crowd.  Out in the corridor, he could sense the
streams of people moving back and forth, their motivations and
feelings blurring as crowds always did.  He was "listening", but
passively, rather than actively.  He didn't know what it took to
attract the attention of the local flavor of telepath, and he wasn't
eager to find out.
	Erik Lehnsherr was standing more toward the front of the
restaurant, next to the brass-railed bar.  He was talking to a pretty
young woman in a grubby grey coverall, a toolbelt, and tanker boots,
her long, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail which revealed that her
ears came to delicate points.  Xavier wondered whether this, and the
dark stripe crossing her cheek and ending in a point near the corner
of her mouth, were cosmetic modifications or natural features.  In
this world, one could never be sure.
	She and Erik talked for a few minutes more; then she nodded,
got down from her barstool, slapped some change on the bar, and left
the Flightline Cafe with a smooth, loose-jointed, confident walk.
	Magneto watched her go, then walked back to the corner booth,
gathered his cape over his arm, and sat.
	"That young lady," he informed Xavier, "is the first mate of a
starship which might be able to get us out of here.  She's gone to get
the captain, who happens to be her brother."
	"How do you intend to persuade him to take us anywhere with no
money?" Xavier inquired calmly.  He knew Lehnsherr well enough to know
that the man certainly had such a plan, and he was curious to know
what it was.
	"Well, Charles," said Lehnsherr with a dry little smile, "I
think I can pull together enough of an advance to get us started.
When we get to the other end, why... I suppose I shall have to sell
you."
	Xavier blinked, taken momentarily aback, and was just starting
to feel a bit indignant when he saw the twinkle in his old friend's
steel-blue eyes and realized what the joke was.  He was banking on the
International Police being interested enough in Xavier's abilities,
and possibly his own, to stake them for the rest of their passage.
	"Suppose," Xavier asked softly, "the International Police
turns out to be just as bad as what we're leaving?"
	"I doubt they are.  The local press wouldn't be so
vituperative toward them if they were anything but a diametrically
opposed faction.  At any rate, it's a risk, but a calculated one.  Our
position will be no worse."
	"Except that we'll be aboard a space station rather than on an
inhabitable planet."
	"We may be able to turn that to our advantage if the
circumstances require it," said Magneto with another small smile.
	Xavier considered that, then nodded.  "All right, we'll try
it.  We have little enough to lose, at this point."
	A moment later, the woman reappeared, accompanied by a
slightly taller man with short hair the same color as hers and a
strikingly similar face, right down to the stripe.  He could be
nothing other than her brother, possibly her twin, and he walked with
the same slightly lazy grace.
	Coupled with the pistol holstered low on his hip and his
relaxed clothes - white shirt, black trousers, black vest - his
demeanor gave him the look of a gambler or a gunfighter.  The truth
was, he was both, in the grand tradition of his galactically famous
father.
	"Evening, gentlemen," he said in a soft voice backed by
considerable strength.  He slid into the booth across from them,
making room for his sister.  "I'm Jason Solo.  Jane tells me you have
a business proposition for us."
	"We need to get to Babylon 6," said Magneto flatly.
"Unscrutinized."
	Solo considered this, then grunted.  "Running blips is a
dangerous business these days," he said.  "We're not opposed to
bucking the system, you understand, but danger costs extra."
	Xavier sat, hands folded in front of him, and let Lehnsherr do
the talking.
	"I can give you two thousand Salusian credits now," he said,
"with twenty thousand more when we get to Babylon 6."
	"Awfully thin advance margin," said Jane; Xavier noticed that
her voice was mellower than her brother's, though her gaze was even
more appraising.  "Who's backing you up on the other end?"
	Without turning a hair, as if he'd known the man all his life
and had the promise straight from his lips, Magneto looked calmly back
at her and said, "Chief Hutchins of the International Police."
	Jane glanced thoughtfully at her brother.
	"Well, his credit's good," said Jason.  "Is he expecting you?"
	"No," Magneto replied honestly, "but he'll be very glad to see
us, I assure you."
	It was at about that moment that it struck Xavier - Erik was
bargaining with these people, and being straight with them in the
process, rather than simply saying, "I am Magneto.  You will take me
to Babylon 6 or you will very much regret it."
	He could follow his old friend's chain of logic without a
problem, too.  With his sublime self-assurance, Magneto was banking
heavily on the following assumptions:
	- Don Griffin was here.
	- Don would have sought out his local counterpart and compared
notes.
	- He could not possibly have neglected to mention such
significant figures in his home reality as Magneto and Professor X.
	- His counterpart, given his position in the universe, would
gladly pay 20,000 credits to have the two of them in his hands rather
than Earth's.
	Xavier only hoped that a) he was right; and b) Don's local
counterpart was the same sort of man Don was.  That kind of thing was
not always the case, Xavier knew.  He had read about Don's fiercest
battle, just before his first disappearance and presumed death.
	In that battle, the armored X-Man had tangled with an
alternate-universe version of himself who happened to be a fanatical
Nazi.  Given the "real" Don's feelings for Kitty Pryde, who was
Jewish, it had come as no surprise to Xavier to learn that their
battle had been a spectacular, brutal, no-holds-barred affair, a grim
and violent duel to the death.
	Here's hoping, thought Xavier as he sat silently and watched
Erik bargain for their passage, Don's local equivalent really is
equivalent, and not a man like that.

			   PALACE-IMPERIAL
			   SAENAR, SALUSIA
		  5:30 PM (11:30 PM NEW AVALON TIME)

	The TARDIS materialized outside the Palace-Imperial's outer
courtyard wall, on the sidewalk near the public transit station.  As
Kitty and Don disembarked, Don noticed with a smile that the decal on
the front had changed to the Cheltarese version of the Pepsi-Cola
logo.
	Finding Rahne Sinclair was not difficult.  Once they were out
of the TARDIS, all the two X-Men had to do was listen.  They hadn't
often heard Rahne sing - normally she was too shy - but who else was
going to be singing a Scottish song on the grounds of the Salusian
Palace-Imperial?

"Whare hae ye been sae braw, my lad?
Whare hae ye been sae brankie, O?
Whare hae ye been sae braw, my lad?
Cam ye by Killiecrankie, O?

An ye hae been whare I hae been
Ye wad na been sae canty, O;
An ye hae seen what I hae seen
On th'braes o'Killiecrankie, O!"

	They went to the outer palace gates; Kitty's Lens got them
past the guards without a problem.  They followed the singing - quite
nicely done, actually - up a bricked path, then over a grassy rise.

"I faught at land, I faught at sea;
At hame I faught my auntie, O;
But I met the Devil and Dundee
On th'braes o'Killiecrankie, O!

An ye hae been whare I hae been
Ye wad na been sae canty, O;
An ye hae seen what I hae seen
On th'braes o'Killiecrankie, O!"

	Topping the rise, they found Rahne, all right - half-sitting,
half-lying on the ground in a grassy, tree-shaded glade in her
transitional form.  She was stretched out full length and propped up
on her elbows, singing Robbie Burns to a rapt-looking group of five
off-duty Salusian Guards in their workout clothes.  Rahne herself was
wearing a rather-worse-for-wear X-Men battle uniform under a Guards
semi-dress jacket which was somewhat too big for her.
	The whole tableau was so odd, and yet so amusing, that they
didn't have the heart to break it up.  Instead, they paused at the
edge of the glade, not intruding, to listen to the rest of the song.

"Th' bauld Pitcur fell in a furr,
An' Clavers got a clankie, O;
Or I had fed an Athole gled,
On th'braes o'Killiecrankie, O!

An ye hae been whare I hae been
Ye wad na been sae canty, O;
An ye hae seen what I hae seen
On th'braes o'Killiecrankie, O!"

	Rahne finished the song, feeling a pleasant glow of
comradeship for these fine young folk who had made her adjustment to
this strange new world painless with their easy good fellowship.  She
opened her eyes to take in their reactions, and as she did she noticed
two more figures standing between two of the trees on the path side of
the glade.
	For a half-second, she was worried, but then she saw that
their body language was completely non-aggressive.  There were two of
them, a man and a woman; they were standing very close together, hand
in hand in fact, and they were both smiling at her.
	At about the time she registered that, she realized that they
were human, not Salusian; and a half-second after that, she realized
that she knew them.
	"Kitty!" she blurted, jumping to her feet.  "An' Don!"
	Without realizing it, she reverted to her normal human form as
she jumped up, a thing which took her new Salusian friends a bit by
surprise.  Rahne didn't notice as she darted past the slightly
bewildered Guards to grab her old friends up in an embrace.
	"Rahne, are you OK?" asked Don when he could breathe again.
	"Ne'er better," Rahne replied positively.  "An' I see yui're
nae dead either."
	"So far, so good," said Kitty with a grin.

	Half an hour later, the eight of them, along with a very
harried-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration official,
were jammed into a small office on the fourth floor of the palace,
sorting through the voluminous paperwork that comes with being a
dimensionally displaced person on Salusia.
	Don leaned against the wall in the corner, arms folded,
watching Rahne grapple with the paperwork.  Like Paige, she had
changed a lot in the five years or so since he last saw her.
	Then, she'd been sixteen and still rather scrawny, a late
bloomer whose lack of fashion sense and chronic self-image problems
didn't help.  She'd still been cutting her thick red hair in that
Annie Lennox crew cut, which didn't do anything for her.  Rachel
Summers could get away with that hairstyle, she had the brass in her
attitude to back it up; but on Rahne it just looked... repressed.
	Apparently she'd loosened up a little bit in the five years
since then; her bright red hair, too thick and wiry to wear very long,
had grown out into a slightly disordered pageboy, low-maintenance and
casual.  She'd certainly shot up and filled out, too.  Even in her
human shape, which was considerably more lightly built than her
wolf-girl form, she did nice things to that beat-up X-Men battle suit.
	On the other side of her, Kitty Griffin noticed the thoughtful
look on her husband's face, followed his entire train of thought, and
gave him a mischievous little grin.  Don chuckled, reserving a
good-natured groan for his inside voice.  That look told him,
essentially, that he was busted and would pay for it later.  He
returned his attention to more important matters.
	"Rahne," he said helpfully, "there's no 'o' in 'adventurer.'"
	"Och," said Rahne, waving a hand.  "Next ye'll be tellin' me
how tae spell 'pseudo-lycanthropoid'."
	Kitty mused thoughtfully for a second, leaned toward Rahne,
sniffed the air around her tentatively, and then presented her
findings:
	"...you're drunk!"
	"Nae!" Rahne said, offended.  "A trifle tipsy, p'raps," she
allowed after a moment's thought, "but nae drunk."
	"What have you been drinking?" asked Don in a tone of mild
curiosity.
	"Nae but small beer, really.  That nice lad Kerit and his
friends had some durin' their game."  
	Don turned a questioning look to Kerit, who shrugged and said,
"APA."
	"Asrial's Finest Pale Ale?" asked Don; the Guardsman nodded.
	"Good grief," said Kitty.  "That stuff hits humans harder than
Lagavulin!"
	"We didn't know she was human!" Nellis Ells protested.
	"I'm -fine-," Rahne insisted.  "A creature like me has a
consid'rable tolerance f'r alcohol, ye knoow.  B'sides, I oonly had
three."
	At about that time, Jubilation Lee elbowed her way into the
office, her face lit up with delight.
	"Well, if it ain't Rahne Sinclair!" she said, getting a hug.
"What've they got you doing - oh, man, these forms are a bitch, aren't
they?  Oh, ugh, -and- you have the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ones to
deal with!  -Maximum- suction.  Hold on, lemme call somebody who can
help cut through the red tape."
	Turning to the immigration official, she gestured imperiously
and said, "Gimme a phone, yo."
	The official blinked at her, then handed her his desk phone.
Jubilee, the tip of her tongue wedged into the corner of her mouth,
dialed a long number from heart, then said, "... Gryph?  Jubilation
Lee here.  Listen, one of our DPs washed up on Salusia, she's had
three APAs and she's not the best speller when she's sober if you
catch my drift... "

	Twenty minutes later, they were on their way - but not before
Rahne promised to come back as soon as she could and visit Kerit and
his squad.

			SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
			 9:15 PM PACIFIC TIME

	Jason Solo's father, the late, great Han Solo, had taught him
everything he knew about the business of being a freelance spacer.  He
had been a man with many maxims and rules for living, most of which he
himself had willfully broken at one point or another in his life.
	As he finished supervising the fueling of his ship in
Revetment 14 at San Diego International, one of Solo's Laws was
foremost in Jason's mind:
	"The whole tone of a job is set by the way the cargo arrives.
If you have a smooth loading, the rest of the job will be no problem;
but if you have problems getting the load on board, the trip's gonna
be nothing but trouble."
	The two guys who had hired him and his sister to take them to
Babylon 6 were fifteen minutes late, and Jason was uneasy.  He hadn't
liked the job much to begin with.  Something about the tall guy in the
helmet (what was with -that-, anyway?) reminded him of the few Psi
Cops he'd had the misfortune of meeting over the last few years,
probably the cool, penetrating look in his eyes.  Jason was starting
to wonder if this whole deal might be a Psi Corps sting operation,
intended to crack down on spacers who helped fugitive telepaths.
	Which was assuredly what the bald guy in the hoverchair was;
Jason had seen enough in his day to recognize the type.  He had to
hand it to this particular one, he was the calmest blip Jason had ever
seen.  Most of them looked much more harried and hunted.  This guy
was together, calm and collected.  Concerned, sure, but not fearful.
	He wasn't running from a place within the Corps, for sure;
they'd have fixed his legs.  Jason figured the guy had to be pretty
good if he'd avoided conscription all this time.  He wasn't young like
most of the never-inducted blips the Solo twins had seen.
	Unless, of course, it was all a sham, in which case he could
get up out of that chair anytime he wanted - and would, just as soon
as the time was right to strike.
	Jason pushed that thought out of his head as the revetment door
opened and the two of them came through.  If they were real customers,
it wouldn't do for them to get the impression that their pilot was
suspicious of them - and if they weren't, well, it still wouldn't do.
	He didn't even point out that they were late - it would have
been unprofessional.  Anyway, he'd just have kept them waiting while
he finished up the fueling.  He'd forgotten what a steaming pile the
fueling equipment at San Diego was.
	He just finished stowing the fueling hoses, made sure the
ports were buttoned up, and said, "Ready to go, gentlemen?"
	The bald one looked distracted, his fingertips to his
forehead, as he guided his antique hoverchair up the Millennium
Falcon's ramp; the guy in the helmet strode along beside him, looking
grim.  Neither made any comment at all about the old freighter's
dilapidated appearance, which customarily attracted neither the
attention of the authorities nor confident exclamations from her
infrequent paying passengers.
	The chair-bound passenger (neither Jason nor Jane had asked
for any names) grew steadily more preoccupied-looking as the Solo
twins prepped their ship for launch.  He looked like he was trying to
think of something - or make contact with someone, perhaps.  As he
slid behind the pilot's controls, Jason glanced at his sister, who was
already strapped in as copilot.  She shrugged slightly, confirming
that, whatever mind he might be touching, she didn't think it was
hers.

		    PSI CORPS DETENTION CENTER 71
			      SWISS ALPS

	"How's the new subject coming along?"
	"Not too well.  We've got her on the full suite right now, but
aside from keeping her semiconscious, it's not doing jack.  We can't
even get her name.  She's been trained and trained well, but the
techniques aren't ours."
	"So she could lead us to a whole new resistance cell?"
	"That's the idea.  Spencer thinks she's a DDP, but the boss
figures different.  Either way, we've got a pro coming up from Zurich,
but he's stuck in this fucking storm.  Won't be here 'til morning."
	"Yeah, hell of a thing, isn't it?  I've never seen a storm
like this in the 20 years I've been stationed up here.  Ah, well.  At
least this one's easy to keep an eye on."
	"You got that right.  Too bad they don't let us use the old
physical techniques any more.  I'd love to - "
	"What the hell?"
	"She's spiking.  Get some more Ephtrazine in there."
	"Jesus, Johan, look at the glass!"
	"Oh, FUCK, she's a TEEK!"
	"Some kind of hard emotional peak, she's - oh, Christ, she's
dreaming, she's DREAMING - "
	"Prozium, 75 mils - flatten out those wave spikes before - "
	"It's not working it's not WORKING - "

	CRACK.

			      THE TARDIS
			 INTERSTITIAL VORTEX

	It's hard to say exactly how far into the next leg of the
voyage the TARDIS was, given that its kind doesn't really travel
linearly; but, in terms of elapsed time, take it that the timeship was
halfway to Cardassia Prime when it happened.
	One moment they were going along quietly, Don at the controls
checking some things over, everybody else scattered around the
comfortable furniture in the control room, except for Jubilee, who was
kicked back reading a book in the front seat of Don's old Cord
convertible with her feet up on the edge of the door.
	Suddenly, Don looked up sharply, as though someone had shouted
his name.  He looked around the room, his face creased in puzzlement
and pain, as he raised a hand to the side of his head.
	"Don?" asked Kitty quietly.  "You OK?"
	"I think so... I just... I thought I heard - AAAA!"
	The next moment, Don suddenly went rigid, then toppled over
backward, his eyes glowing like fire.  Paige Guthrie scrambled up from
her seat at the end of the couch nearest the control column and caught
him before he could hit the floor.
	"What the -hell-?" said Kitty, kneeling down next to him.
"Don?"
	As suddenly as it struck, the spasm passed; Don's eyes
returned to their normal cool blue and he slumped in Paige's grasp.
	"Wuh," he said.
	"Don?  Are you OK?" Kitty asked again as the others crowded
around.
	Don blinked.  "Yeah... fine," he said.  Then he looked around
in puzzlement.  "... Kitty?  What am I doing on the floor?"

			SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

	"All right, gentlemen, we're off," said Jane as the Millennium
Falcon lifted off from Revetment 14.  "Next stop, Babylon 6."
	The bald passenger's head, which had sunk onto his breast as
he fell into a deep reverie that looked, to the uninitiated, like
sleep, suddenly snapped up with a sharp gasp.
	"Charles?" the helmeted passenger asked, a note of concern in
his voice.
	Charles didn't answer; he looked into nowhere in particular
for a moment, his blue eyes glazed, and then snapped back to reality.
	"No," he said.  "We have to go to Switzerland."
	Jason Solo turned in his chair.  "Switzerland?!" he blurted.
"Flight plan's logged for Metagate 3 and Babylon 6.  I don't know that
Earthforce Control will grant a request to reroute for a terrestrial
hop like that, especially that close to the capital."
	"What's in Switzerland?" Jane wondered.
	"Jean," Xavier replied.  "She's being... held, tortured - it's
all a jumble of images, and feelings, and pain.  Something terrible is
about to happen.  Erik, we must get there as fast as we can."
	"Say for the sake of argument I was willing to do this," said
Jason equably.  "I'm going to need more specific directions to our new
destination than 'Switzerland'."
	An instant later, he had them.
	"... Wow," he said.  "OK."  He bent over the controls,
switching systems from their standard power levels to hot-rodded,
highly illegal ones.
	Then he turned in his seat, smiled crookedly at Xavier, and
said, "This is going to cost you extra, friend."
	The Millennium Falcon broke away from its ex-atmospheric
flight path, rolled over, and streaked eastward.

				TAKKAR
			   CARDASSIA PRIME
		      12:24 AM (NEW AVALON TIME)

  /*  Blue Oyster Cult  "Godzilla"  _On Flame with Rock & Roll_  */

	Cain Marko was actually sort of enjoying himself.  Knocking
down buildings and throwing tanks was very therapeutic, especially
when they belonged to people his instincts said deserved it.  And
Charley would be proud; he hadn't killed a soul.  Well, except for the
victims of his impact, but shit, that wasn't HIS fault.  Cain didn't
have to do many things he didn't want to do, but he hadn't figured out
a way of not hitting the ground when he fell.  Especially from
freaking ORBIT.
	He moved at an easy, leisurely pace through a deserted
commercial neighborhood, courteously avoiding the few structures that
didn't seem to be government buildings, plowing through the ones that
did, and waiting for the local carabinieri to come up with their next
attempt at stopping him.  The last one - air-dropping 15,000 tons of
fast-cooling molten plastic resin on him - had been a pretty good try.
The whole thing was starting to take on the air of a grand day out.
	Up ahead, he heard a faint electrical noise.  Severed cable
flopping around someplace, probably.  He set his sights on the ground
floor of the next governmental-looking building and headed in for the
kill.

	Up on the roof of that building, the TARDIS door opened and
several members of its crew emerged, went to the parapet, and had a
look.
	"Oh, -great-," said Don, palming his face.  "It's the
-Juggernaut-."
	"Oh, great!" said Rahne Sinclair, who was still a trifle
punchy.  "It's the Juggernaut!  OI!  JUGGY!  UP HERE!"
	Don blinked.  "... OK, this was apparently a briefing I
-missed-," he murmured.
	"He can't hear you from clear up here," Jubilee said.  "Let's
see if I can get his attention.  YO!  JUG-MAN!"  She let off a
rippling stream of green and orange fireworks.  "HEY!!"
	"His helmet narrows his field of vision, he can't see you,"
Paige pointed out.
	"Hmm.  Guess not."
	"Well, we'd be'er get his attention SOMEhow," Rahne observed,
"or he'll bring this building daen wi' us still standin' around on th'
roof."
	"Yeah, you're right," Jubilee mused.  Swatting Paige on the
shoulder, she said peremptorily, "Hayseed!  Go get his attention."
	Paige looked at her, then shrugged, climbed up the parapet,
and stepped off the building.
	She was still getting the hang of this whole -flying- thing,
not having had many chances to practice it in the few hours she'd had
the power.  It was such a -rush- though!  Oh, she'd flown before, but
only for limited periods of time, and never like -this-, never with
such a completely -natural- feeling.  She thought she understood now
how Sam felt when he streaked across the sky; except her way made a
lot less noise.
	She dove through the sky, almost but not quite freefalling,
toward the lumbering, plodding figure of the Juggernaut.
	Get his attention, eh?
	OK...
	I hope I'm not making a huge mistake... 
	WHANG!
	Juggernaut fetched up against the front of a building off to
the side, mildly stunned and certainly startled but not particularly
harmed.  "WHAT th' - ?!" he blurted, and then saw what had hit him.
	Paige Guthrie stood in the street just in front of the last of
his footprints, wincing and rubbing the knuckles of her right hand.
	"Oh!  Hey, Guthrie," said the Juggernaut amiably.  He reached
up and fingered the slight dent in his helmet.  Through the eyeslots,
Paige could see his eyebrows go up.  "Say, that's a pretty good right
cross ya got there."
	"ow, ow, ow, ow, ow," said Paige, shaking her hand.
	Marko got back to his feet, lumbered over to Paige, took her
hand in one of his huge mitts, and looked it over.  "Ah, yer OK," he
said, "just bruised it a little.  Some advice?  Next time don't hit my
helmet."  He rapped on the metal dome with a knuckle.  "It's th'
hardest part o' me, see."
	"I -noticed- that," Paige replied, massaging her hand.
	"That's a new look for you, ain't it?" asked the Juggernaut
thoughtfully.  "I like it.  Classy.  'Swhat I like about you, kid," he
said, clapping her on the shoulder.  "Ya got class."
	OK, thought Paige to herself as the TARDIS rematerialized
behind her.  Now I -know- this outfit was a mistake.
	She didn't really mean it, though; in fact, though it would
take several days before she'd admit it to Jubilee, she was starting
to like it.

			  SWISS ALPS, EARTH
		      12:40 AM (NEW AVALON TIME)

	    /*  The Cult  "Rise"  _Beyond Good & Evil_  */

	Jane Solo kept an eye on the terrain-following radar as the
Millennium Falcon streaked through the stone and ice canyons of the
Alps, dodging amongst the peaks.  At the controls, Jason stared
forward through the transparisteel cockpit windows with the laser-like
focus which both twins had inherited from their mother.  His hands
worked the ship's controls automatically as he followed the silent
telepathic cues of the passenger called Charles, who had closed his
eyes to better concentrate.
	The other passenger, Erik, was also concentrating, though
Jane wasn't sure what on.  When they'd started their hell-bent,
unauthorized dash toward the capital of the Earth Alliance, he had
assured her that no electromagnetic sensor would detect the Falcon,
but he had declined to tell her just how he intended to accomplish
that feat.
	Nevertheless, he seemed to be doing it.  They hadn't been
challenged by Earthforce Control or any other aerospace defense agency
as they tore across defense zone borders and raced straight past the
heart of the Alliance into the mountains.
	"There!" said Charles, opening his eyes and pointing.  A
second later, Jason and Jane saw it themselves - a low, squat, dark
building, raised on the peak of one of the mountains to the east.  The
sun was rising behind that particular mountain, turning its slopes and
the flanks of the mountains around it blue-purple-pink with the colors
of dawn.
	For a second, Jane thought the next thing she saw was that
dawn, the light of the sun peeking over the building on the
mountaintop.  Then she realized that the rising sun was still below
the horizon, and that the building hadn't been overshone by the
light... it had been obliterated by it.
	The explosion ripped outward and upward, shivered, and
condensed into the form of a gigantic bird of pure orange-yellow fire,
its raptor's beak open in a silent cry of defiance, its wings spread
over the devastation, flooding the mountains with false dawn.
	"My GOD!" Jason blurted, halting the already-decelerating
Falcon on her repulsors a mile or so short of the fountain of fire.
"What IS that?"
	Charles smiled a slightly tired smile.
	"Her name is Jean," he said, and as he did so, Jason's keen
spacer's eyes made out the dark shape of a person at the heart of the
flaming bird.  A moment later, the phenomenon collapsed into a point
of light which started making its way toward them.
	"She's the one we came to pick up," said Charles calmly.
	Jason rounded on him.  "If you think I'm taking -that- on
board my -ship-, old man, you're out of your -mind-."
	"Young man," said Erik in a tone of mild amusement, "it
doesn't do to speak lightly of losing one's mind around Charles here."
He patted Xavier on the shoulder.
	"Erik," said Charles admonishingly.  "Jason, I'm Professor
Charles Xavier.  As you've no doubt deduced by now, I'm a telepath.
That woman's name is Jean Grey; she's a student of mine and a very
dear friend.  She would no more harm you than would I.  You were
willing to come here to help her.  Does what she can do make such a
difference that you're not willing to help her any more?"
	Jason considered that, glanced at his sister, saw her nod, and
turned back to Xavier.
	"OK," he said.  "We'll take her."  He punched the key that
opened the topside boarding hatch.
	Jane grinned a wry, crooked grin very like her brother's at
Xavier and added, "But this is -definitely- going to cost you extra."

			 HIPSVILLE, FUNKOTRON
		      1:05 AM (NEW AVALON TIME)

	Donald Griffin emerged from his TARDIS into a torrential
downpour.
	That was disorienting, but not as disorienting as the pounding
drums, or the fact that the TARDIS had materialized near the edge of a
huge throng of cheering, dancing people.
	"What the heck's going on?" Kitty asked as she stepped out
beside him.
	"Beats me," he replied, buttoning his trenchcoat.  "Sounds
like the ending credits from 'Who Am I?'"
	"Are you sure they're here?" Kitty asked.
	"That's what the trace said.  One of the DDPs is somewhere in
this crowd."
	"Well, then," said Logan grimly, "I guess we'd better start
looking."
	The TARDIS crew fanned out into the reveling mob.  It was a
very happy mob, and one which gave the searchers easy paths through
the mass - even Cain Marko, who had divested himself of his usual
battle togs in favor of street clothes that almost made him look
normal, except for the fact that he was about the size of a
Clydesdale.
	As Hank McCoy excuse-me'd through part of the group, a man in
a t-shirt labeled "Liquid Diamond Lipstick" grinned broadly at him.
	"Hey there, Mr. Bear!" the man said cheerfully.  "-Solid-."
He rummaged in a pocket and proffered a fat hand-rolled cigarette.
"Spliff?"
	"Er... no thank you, my good man," said McCoy; then a
thoughtful look crossed his muzzled face and he said, "Well, perhaps
for later.  I'm on the clock right now, you see."
	"Ahhh," said the man, who handed over the joint with an
understanding, sympathetic nod, as though he'd heard of such things
happening to other, unfortunate people.  "STBY, dude," he said.
	"It most assuredly does," agreed the Beast, and he kept
searching.
	There was plenty of that particular substance in use in this
crowd as it was; even the rain wasn't cutting into it.  Most of the
searchers felt a little light-headed after a few minutes' exposure.
	Kitty Griffin didn't have to excuse-me her way through the
crowd; she could just slip through them, silent and for the most part
unnoticed.  She was the one who found Storm first.  For a second, she
passed right over the dreadlocked figure in black leather, taking her
for another reveler - but then she went back for another look and
recognized her face.
	Don emerged from the crowd and joined Kitty at about the same
time, and the two approached their old teammate together.
	Ororo didn't notice them at first, mostly because she was too
caught up in the music.  She didn't register them as anything other
than two more fellow revelers until Don put a hand on her shoulder and
said her name over the sound of the music and the crowd.
	Then she turned to look, and her eyes - blank white, without
iris or pupil, which meant SHE was the cause of this rain - went wide,
a delighted smile coming over her whole face.
	"Donald Griffin!" she cried - and then, to Don's (and
Kitty's!) immense surprise, she threw her arms around the Time Lord's
shoulders and kissed him full on the mouth.  A cheer went up from the
crowd all around them.
	When she was through with him, Don sputtered a little bit and
then said, "'Roro, are you all right?"
	"I'm fine, Don, just fine," Ororo replied with a smile.  "Why
wouldn't I be?  I have the music," she said, gesturing to the stage.
"I have all these friends," she added, gesturing to the crowd around
them, which cheered again.  "And I have the cooling rain!" she added,
and it started to rain even harder, much to the delight of the crowd.
(Only now did Don notice that it wasn't raining over the stage where
the band was - just everywhere ELSE.)  "What more could I need?"
	Kitty employed her incisive powers of diagnosis for the second
time that day.  Giggling, she said, "Ororo, you are -stoned-."
	Storm drew herself up to her full height (some inches taller
than Kitty, for Storm was a tall woman and Kitty was not) and said
haughtily, "I most certainly am NOT!"  Then she smiled and said, "I'm
simply in tune with the spirit of this celebration.  Join me, my
friends!  Let us use this dance to celebrate our reunion."
	"Looks like we're going to be here for a while," Don observed
wryly as they joined the dance.
	"I don't mind a bit," Kitty replied.  She always -had- loved
to dance, and this was good music for it, too.

		INTERNATIONAL POLICE STATION BABYLON 6
	       EPSILON ERIDANI SYSTEM, CENTAURUS SECTOR
			       2:05 AM

	The Millennium Falcon docked at one of Babylon 6's internal
bays.  The Solos didn't generally like to do that - it made them too
dependent on the goodwill of the station operators to get out again -
but this time, since they were here to deliver passengers to the Chief
of the International Police himself, they figured that probably wasn't
going to be a problem.
	Unless these guys had come here as part of an elaborate plan
to try and knock off Gryphon, which didn't seem all that likely.
	They were halfway across the docking bay when a pair of
blue-clad International Police tactical troopers, a man and a woman,
each wearing the special shoulder patch of the station's cooperative
security force, came through the entry door to meet them.  Both were
surprisingly young for police officers - they looked to be in their
mid-to-late teens, assuming they were as human as they appeared.
	The young man, tall, dark-haired, and serious-looking, had
four metallic discs attached to the front of his jumpsuit.  Xavier
wondered what they were for.  His companion was a petite girl with
short orange hair and a pretty face that looked like it would rather
be smiling.
	"Professor Xavier?" said the young man.  When Xavier
acknowledged it, the officer extended a hand.  "Welcome to Babylon 6,
sir.  I'm Officer Krinn; this is Officer Ranzz.  The First Lensman has
asked us to show you and your companions to his office right away."
He turned to Jason and Jane.  "Captain Solo, you and your first mate
are welcome to head to the pilots' lounge on Blue 3 - dinner's on the
IPO if you're hungry."
	"Sounds like a good deal to me," Jane said.  "I skipped lunch
to put this charter together."
	"We -are- getting paid, right?" said Jason, half-jokingly.
	Ranzz nodded, smiling.  "As we speak.  50 kilocredits on the
Bank of Salusia, the Chief hopes that'll be satisfactory."
	Jane blinked, her eyes going wide.  "(Holy crap, Jase!)" she
whispered to her brother.  "(We can almost pay off - )"
	"(Ixnay!)" Jason replied, nudging her with an elbow.  "(Not in
front of the law... )"
	Ranzz chuckled and made a show of not hearing, and the group
was moving toward the exit when, two stories above them, in the
rafters of the gymnasium-sized docking bay, something went wrong.
	There was a facilities maintenance crew up there changing one
of the atmospheric regulator units.  They had done everything right in
tagging the old unit off and dismantling it, and were swaying it down
from its position on the ceiling; but there was a flaw in one of the
anti-gravity units they were using for that job, and while the crew
got the unit balanced for lowering, it burned out.
	The remaining units should have been able to handle the load,
in conjunction with the emergency strap, long enough for the crew to
get another gravity clamp on the processor; but one of the others had
the same defect as the failed one, and under the extra load, it too
failed.  That sealed the processor's fate.  With two gravity pods out,
the remaining units burned out too, in quick succession, and the
emergency strap couldn't handle the unit's full weight by itself.
	For an agonizing second, it looked like it might, the five-ton
conditioner unit swinging at the end of the duranylon webbing; but
then the strap parted, and the unit fell, accelerating toward the top
of Charles Xavier's head with something quite near to the rate it
would have shown on Earth.
	Officer Krinn heard the shouts of the crew first, whirled, and
saw the metal oblong plummeting toward his distinguished visitor.  He
reacted instinctively, calling on his natural Braalian gift to save
the man.
	The people of Braal all have an innate magnetic resonance
which they can use to manipulate metal objects.  The most popular
sport on Braal is called magnoball, and is rather like the Earth game
of basketball played with a shotput and no player contact with the
ball allowed.  The most powerful of Braal's magnetokinetics train
intensively, building their muscles, so to speak, for the game; and
before he heard the call of justice and joined the International
Police, Rokk Krinn was the greatest magnoball player Braal ever saw.
	It's likely that no other Braalian would have been able to put
a significant dent in the atmospheric processor's momentum, let alone
stop it cold, but Krinn, the veins in his neck bulging, did it.
Screaming with the effort, he struggled to keep it up there, to muster
that last extra bit of energy needed to -move- it, tip it, turn it
away from its course.
	An instant later, it was plucked from his grasp by a power far
beyond his own, one which left him stunned, awestruck, as his natural
magnetic sensitivity gave him an inkling of its strength.
	"Thank you, young man, I have it," said Erik Lehnsherr calmly.
Then, without turning a hair, with a careless flick of one gloved
hand, Magneto tossed the processor negligently aside, like a grown man
taking a brick from a child's struggling hand and casually discarding
it.  It crashed to the deck a dozen yards away.
	Krinn stared at him wide-eyed for a moment, receiving only a
cordial little smile and nod in return.
	"Thank you, Officer, Erik," said Professor X, unruffled.
"Shall we?"
	Krinn looked a little glazed as he and Ranzz led the little
procession through the halls of Babylon, but the three guests didn't
notice.  Professor X was busy taking in the sights and sounds around
him, reinforcing his suspicions from San Diego in spades.  Magneto was
doing a bit of the same, but also watching his companions' reactions.
And Jean... 
	Jean had been a little... weird... ever since they'd picked
her up, and no wonder.  She'd only just come out of a drug-induced
coma which followed the unconsciousness of dimensional displacement
shock to find herself briefly connected to the lifeforce of every
living thing in the quadrant, then been picked up by a starship
containing her beloved mentor and his oldest foe.  Even for a person
as sturdily adaptable as Jean, that was a lot to take in all at once.
	Besides which, she was still a little bit... well, the only
really appropriate word Magneto could think of was -fey-.  Her eyes
weren't glowing any more, and she was walking on the deckplates like a
regular person, but her hair was still slightly mobile, like she was
standing in a breeze that wasn't there, and every now and then a tiny
lick of flame would peek out around a lock of the red.  Her eyes were
their normal color, but wider than usual.
	As they moved into more crowded parts of the station, Jean
became more and more uncomfortable.  Her telepathy was still cranked
up to 11 and she hadn't been able to pull it back down yet.  That
hadn't been a big problem aboard the Falcon, with only four other
people around, two of them preoccupied with mundane tasks, one
shielded, and one the professor... but here in this teeming, bustling
station, it was all getting a little overwhelming.
	When they entered the Zocalo, the station's common-area-cum-
shopping-mall, the cacophony crashed in on her like a truck jumping a
curb and smashing into a storefront.  She wilted visibly, stumbling a
little, as she struggled to keep from involuntarily learning the
complete life history and innermost secrets of every being in the room
whose mind was humanoid enough for her to comprehend - and never MIND
the alien signals overlaying the huge mass of 'normal' traffic pouring
into her oversensitized brain.
	She stumbled again, squeezing her eyes shut, feeling like she
might fall, might scream, might throw up, might wipe all their minds
just to have a little quiet - 
	- when she felt a slight pressure, like caring hands closing
gently on her head, and it all just... went away.
	Jean's eyes flew wide open with surprise; she reached up to
touch her head and felt cool metal.  It moved under her fingertips,
settling more firmly against her head, conforming to the shape of her
skull and making little openings for her earlobes, and then settled
and solidified in the perfect shape for her - a firm, comforting
presence, like the hand of a friend.  As it did so, the last whispers
and rivulets of what had been a tide of unwanted psionic contact
faded out, leaving her with perfect silence.
	She turned, and Erik Lehnsherr stood behind her, bareheaded,
smoothing his slightly wavy silver hair with one hand.  The other hand
moved down the side of the helmet and rested briefly on her shoulder
before he withdrew it.
	"I... thank you," she said softly.
	Lehnsherr smiled, his face showing a kindness that surprised
Jean, accustomed as she was to viewing him as an implacable foe - or
at least an unsympathetic outsider.
	"You're welcome, Miss Grey," he said quietly, and then nodded
to indicate that they were falling behind.  Clearly, he didn't want to
talk about it - which was fine with Jean.  What more was there to say,
really?

	The Chief of International Police Operations, Donald Griffin's
local counterpart, was a man named Benjamin Hutchins, though almost
everyone called him "Gryphon".  As they were shown into his presence,
his three guests paused for a moment to remark to themselves on the
resemblance, which was indeed striking.
	This man was a little shorter than the one they remembered,
and his hair was a slightly lighter shade of brown (none of them knew
that Don's hair had gone black at his most recent regeneration), but
his face was very similar, and he had the same sort of smile as he
welcomed them to his tiny, cramped office.
	There were two other people with him.  One was a tall,
powerfully built black man, fully as bald as Professor X, with dark,
penetrating eyes, simple beige robes, and the intense aspect of a
martial artist.  The other was a small, slim, brown-haired, amber-eyed
girl who appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties.  She was
trimly uniformed in black and grey, and her manner was quiet and
businesslike despite the lateness of the hour.
	"You'll have to excuse the accommodations," said Gryphon with
an apologetic smile.  "I don't use this office very often.  Let's go
to the conference room, we'll be more comfortable there."
	As they went down a short hallway to the conference room, the
Chief went on, "Don and Kitty have told me what's happening, and I've
heard about you from them.  You must be Professor Charles Xavier, and
of course you're Jean Grey, which would make you Erik Lehnsherr."
	They admitted it; Gryphon gracefully made no comment on Jean's
unusual headgear as he opened the conference room and led them all
inside.
	"I'm Ben Hutchins of the IPO; everyone calls me Gryphon, as
I'm sure you've been told already."  He gestured to the table, and the
visitors seated themselves.  Gryphon sat at the table's head.  The man
with him sat down on his left, his keen eyes still studying the
newcomers, and the girl remained standing at his right elbow, which he
didn't appear to notice at first.
	"This," said Gryphon, nodding to his left, "is Master Mace
Windu of the Order of Jedi Knights, a colleague and advisor of mine.
And this - "  He turned to his right, saw that there was no one in
that chair, and then looked over his shoulder.  "... Lu, you can sit
down, you know."
	The girl smiled.  "You haven't offered anyone refreshments
yet, sir," she said.
	"We're grown-ups, we can get our own refreshments," Gryphon
protested in a hectic mutter that made Jean Grey, even after the day
she'd had, stifle a giggle.  "You're not my maid, for crissake, you're
my yeoman."
	The girl didn't bother stifling her giggle, which had a flavor
of oh-Dad-aren't-you-silly about it.  "If I minded, sir, I wouldn't do
it," she said.  Then she waited a beat and pointed out helpfully,
"Everyone is staring at you."
	Gryphon made a good-natured grumbling noise.  "Why do I always
get Evil Lu at this time of night?"
	She beamed.  "You're just lucky, sir."
	Gryphon looked up at her for a moment, then sighed and turned
back to the table.  "... And this is my yeoman, Lieutenant Luornu
Durgo," he said with a sheepish smile, "who would like to know if you
want any refreshments."  He turned to the door, where the two
blue-suited security officers were standing in guard positions.  "You
guys can sit down too if you want," he added.  "Or head out, for that
matter.  I don't think we'll be needing guards.  You're on the night
shift?"
	Krinn nodded.  "Yessir," he said.  "Midnight to 0800."
	"Tch," Gryphon said.  "Inhumane.  Have to talk to Garibaldi
about the way he's treating my people."
	Krinn shrugged.  "It's not so bad.  Somebody has to do it."
	"Well, if you want to grab a drink or something to eat,"
Gryphon said, nodding to Lu as she went around the table taking
orders, "now's the time."
	Ranzz smiled.  "Thank you, sir, but we've got lunch in an hour
anyway.  We should probably get back."
	"Well, OK, I guess you're dismissed, then," said Gryphon
agreeably.  "Nice to see you, by the way, Ayla.  How's your brother?"
	"He's doing OK," she replied.  "They're taking the temporary
arm off next week to implant the regen bud.  He should be back on duty
by September."
	"Good," Gryphon said, nodding.  "Tell him I said hello, will
you?"
	"Sure thing, Chief.  G'night, now."

	As the two guards left the dark, deserted IPO office complex
to return to the security office, Ayla chuckled and elbowed her
colleague gently.
	"You still don't like it when I'm informal with the Chief, do
you, Rokk?" she said teasingly.
	Krinn shook his head.  "It's not that," he said.  "I've gotten
used to that, though I still can't bring myself to do it myself.
No... I'm just... thinking about that -guy-."
	"Yeah, that was pretty impressive," Ayla agreed.  "What are
you freaked about, though?  Just because he's stronger than you... "
	Krinn gave her a wide-eyed look.
	"Ayla, I think he's probably stronger than everybody in my
hometown put together," he said.
	Ayla Ranzz considered that for a moment, then let out a low
whistle.  It did not elude her that Rokk Krinn was from the capital
and largest city of Braal.
	"Exactly," said Krinn.  "Can you imagine if that guy ever went
off the rails?  He'd be all but unstoppable."  He shivered slightly.
"Thank the gods he's on -our- side."

			 HIPSVILLE, FUNKOTRON
		      2:09 AM (NEW AVALON TIME)

	Dancing in the rain made a nice break from the long, hectic
day, but it was tiring.  By the Griffins' internal clocks, it was a
bit past 2 in the morning when they finally got Storm disengaged from
the cheering crowd and the whole group trooped back to the TARDIS.
	"That was great," said Kitty, flushed with the pleasure of the
dancing and singing.  "I'm beat, and I'm -soaked-," she added wryly as
her shoes squelched on the tiled control room floor, "but that was
great."
	"People were overheating in the sun," said Ororo with a trace
of primness.  "I had to do -something-."  She smiled reminiscently.
"It was quite an occasion, wasn't it?"
	"And you made quite an impression, darlin'," said Logan with a
chuckle.  "Those folks won't be forgetting -this- festival anytime
soon."
	"Anybody hungry?" Don wondered.
	"Now that you mention it, I'm starving," Storm observed.
	"Well, let's hit the wardrobe rooms for dry clothes, then see
what the autogalley might have for us today," said Don.
	"Hold that thought, love," Kitty said.  "Lens bulletin coming
through.  It's Gryphon... he says... "  Her face broke into a smile of
pure joy.  "Professor Xavier and Jean are in his office!  And Magneto,
too, but he's behaving himself."
	"Well, I guess that's our next stop, then.  We can get a snack
on the way there, then drop in and meet the Chief... and then maybe we
can relax a little."

			      BABYLON 6
			       2:35 AM

	The TARDIS materialized in the corner of the lobby to the
International Police Organization's office suite on Blue 2, its face
having changed in transit from the garish Funkotroni Leet "Z4PX0R UR
+H1R5+!" ad campaign to the more sedate logo-only livery currently
used by Pepsi in most of the Centaurus sector.  At that hour of the
morning, there was no one in the room to see it except violet-eyed
Luornu Durgo, who was waiting there to see the new arrivals into the
conference room.
	The reunions that followed ranged from joyful to reserved,
both between those X-Men who had been separated for a few hours, and
those who had been separated for a few years.  Nobody seemed to know
quite how to take Magneto's presence; he stood off to one side with
his arms folded, taking it all in with an almost sentimental little
smile on his face.
	Don Griffin hadn't been sure how he would react to seeing Jean
Grey again.  She was one of the original X-Men, pre-dating his own
presence at the mansion by several years, and though he'd always liked
and admired her (she was tough as nails, and undeniably gorgeous),
they'd never been really close.  Looking back, he didn't think he'd
ever been alone with her, on a job or otherwise.
	That had all been complicated somewhat by the fact that Don's
first serious girlfriend, Rachel Summers, had been Jean's daughter
from a parallel future - something Jean had had a hard time wrapping
her head around when she finally learned it.  It had struck Don as
kind of odd, too, especially as he got closer to Ray and began to
realize that most of the things he liked about her, she'd inherited
from her mother.
	Eventually, Jean -had- gotten used to it, and even come to the
point where she was able to make and take little jokes about it
sometimes.  In that late stage, when he and Ray were actually married,
Don had sometimes called Jean "Mom" to get a rise out of her.
	He hadn't been able to make the same kind of gentle joke with
Rachel's might-be father, though; Scott Summers and Don had a
long-standing personality conflict that went back to before Rachel
ever appeared on the scene at the Xavier mansion.  His disapproval of
the whole matter had colored many things between Don and Jean - and
now, of course, Ray was gone...
	Well, anyway, there was a lot of water under that bridge, and
Don hadn't the faintest idea how he'd react to seeing her again, or
she to seeing him.
	It came as a bit of a surprise, then, that he was just the
fourth one out of the TARDIS group that she embraced, after only her
two fellow original X-Men, Hank McCoy and Bobby Drake, and Logan.  Not
that he was complaining, but it was a bit of a surprise.
	He was also momentarily puzzled by the fact that she was
wearing Magneto's helmet, but after a moment's thought the reason for
it became obvious.
	She didn't say anything; just hugged him, looked at him for a
second, and then moved on.
	Don glanced after her for a second, shrugged, and went to
greet himself.
	Kitty and Don exchanged pleasantries with Gryphon and waited
until everyone else had said hello to Professor X before they took
their turn.  When they did, the professor's smile, already wide with
delight that so many of his students and friends were safe, broadened
further.
	"Well!" he said.  "Don Griffin and Kitty Pryde."  He shook
hands with Don and leaned forward for a hug from Kitty, saying as he
did so, "I wasn't sure I'd ever see the two of you again."
	Kitty presented her left hand; the overhead lights glinted
from the band of silvery-white metal on her third finger.
	"It's not Pryde any more, Professor," she said with a smile.
"It's Griffin."
	It hadn't seemed possible for Xavier's smile to widen even
further, but widen it did.
	"Congratulations!" he said.  Taking her hand between both of
his, he smiled up at Kitty, then at Don, and went on, "I'm so very
happy for both of you.  When?"
	"Last summer, after I finished my bachelor's," Kitty said.
"Now I'm working on my master's and he hardly ever sees me," she added
with a laugh.  "So it's working out fine."
	"We were just celebrating the halfway mark when you guys
started appearing," Don added with a grin; then he became more serious
and said, "How many of you are there likely to be, do you know?"
	"It's hard telling, Don," said Xavier, shaking his head.
"Almost all of us were there, and others besides.  The pattern so far
seems to be random, though.  Paige was right next to me, but Lucas
Bishop was almost as near, and he hasn't turned up?"
	"I don't know him, do I?" Don replied.  "We haven't picked up
a trace on anyone I haven't recognized yet."
	"Mm, no, he was probably after your time," said Xavier,
nodding.  "You have no way of telling?"
	"Not until the TARDIS computer's had a chance to go through
the records fully.  Even then, the sensors might have missed some, and
there might have been some slight temporal displacement such that not
everybody's arrived yet.  We'll just have to keep our eyes open.
Right now we've got no new traces."
	"So I guess the big question is," Gryphon mused, "now what?"
	"I think I should run everyone to New Avalon with the TARDIS,"
said Don.  "The city's a better place to get acclimated in than a
space station - more facilities, more familiar surroundings.  But, I'm
beat and so is everyone else, so we'll take the long way around and
get some sleep first."  He chuckled.  "New Avalon is not a thing to be
experienced on an empty brain."
	Gryphon nodded.  "Good idea.  OK, I'll go ahead by Stargate
and get things ready for you.  Orientation packets and all that kind
of stuff."
	"I appreciate it.  These are friends of mine," said Don.  Then
he glanced from the Juggernaut to Magneto, smiled wryly, and added,
"Well, most of them."

			      THE TARDIS
			 INTERSTITIAL VORTEX
		  3:14 AM (RELATIVE NEW AVALON TIME)

	Upon leaving B6, Don spent a few minutes playing host, getting
everybody settled in guest rooms aboard the timeship.  Fortunately it
had plenty of those, given its almost-infinite interior space, and the
residential block nearest to the control room was reasonably compact,
so no one needed to be issued a TARDIS compass just to find the
control room again.
	Now Don was alone in the control room, setting the controls
for their next jump.  It was a reasonably simple one, B6 to New
Avalon, and normally wouldn't have taken the TARDIS more than a couple
of hours, but Don wanted everyone rested when they got to New Avalon,
so he was adding a temporal orbit loop to the course.  They would
arrive in New Avalon at 10 AM, after a transit lasting ten subjective
hours, plenty of time for everyone to get a good night's sleep and a
hearty breakfast before meeting the galaxy's greatest city face to
face.
	Hank McCoy sloped into the control room just as Don
dematerialized the TARDIS and sent it on his way.  The Beast nodded to
the Time Lord, then silently watched the Time Rotor energize and start
working.
	When the crackling sound of dematerialization had faded down
to the low buzz of cruising, McCoy said, "I am not, perhaps, a fully
qualified Lord of Time like yourself, but I am competent to keep an
eye on the controls for a while if you'd like to get some sleep."
	Don shrugged.  "I don't need a lot of sleep," he said.
	Hank smiled.  "Perhaps not, but I'm sure Kitty would
appreciate your company.  Go, O captain, my captain, and rest.  Should
any emergency arise, the Beast will unleash his most barbaric of
yawps."
	Don chuckled and made a couple of last fine adjustments to the
controls.  "Or you could just use the intercom," he said.
	"Where's the poetry in an intercom?" replied McCoy
dismissively.  "Good night, Don."
	"Night, Hank.  Thanks."
	"Of a certainty," said McCoy as he settled into the sofa with
a book.
	Don left the room, headed into the residential block, and was
about halfway to his quarters when he came across Jean, who was
sitting on the floor in the hall with her head in her hands.
	"Hey," he said softly, kneeling beside her.  "Are you OK?"
	She looked up at him, her eyes slightly unfocused.  "Oh -
Don," she said, recognizing him.  "I'm... I'm fine.  I just... I gave
Magneto's helmet back to him, I didn't think I'd need it with such a
small, familiar group once we were away.  But... I think it's -worse-
now.  I can't hear a vast amount of thoughts like I could on the
station, but... now it's... it's like I can hear the universe working."
	A look of understanding came onto Don's face.  "That's what
that feeling was.  You reconnected with the Phoenix, didn't you?"
	Jean blinked at him.  "You felt... ?"
	He nodded.  "The last time I saw Rachel, she said she was
using the last of her strength to send me home from the Vortex," he
said.  "She said... "  He paused, remembering it exactly.  "'The last
spark of me will live on in you.'"  He sighed, shaking his head.  "At
the time I thought she meant it rhetorically, but I guess not.  What
happened?"
	She told him what little she knew - how she'd blacked out when
the sky turned inside-out and then dreamed of earlier days, of fire
and pain and resurrection, while her real body was strapped to a table
with a machine pumping drugs into it.
	"You must have used the 'last spark' Ray was talking about as
a template," Don said after a few minutes' thought.  "Connected
yourself to -this- universe's vital energies.  Made a new Phoenix -
probably your interpretation of the Force, Gryph would know better
about that.  That's probably what he said he wanted to talk about when
we get back."
	Jean nodded slowly, her eyes searching his face.  "When we
first arrived, there was another man with him, in his office.  Bald,
strong, with the most penetrating eyes I've ever seen - but kind.
Gryphon said his name was Windu."
	"Mace Windu.  He's a Jedi Master.  When you tapped the Force
it must have made a psychic noise that every Jedi in the galaxy
heard."  He sighed.  "Well, we'll sort that out later.  Right now I'm
worried about you."
	Jean smiled wanly.  "Thanks, but... what can you do?  Short of
going down, knocking on Magneto's door, and asking for his helmet
back, and I can do that myself."
	Don grinned and helped her to her feet.  "I can do better than
that.  Come on."

      /*  Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares  "Polegnala e Todora"  */

	He took her to the Zero Room.  She didn't understand at first;
how was a featureless, unfurnished room, indistinguishable from any
other room in the TARDIS but for the soft blue color of its roundeled
walls and plain ceiling and floor, going to help her?
	That lasted until he closed the door, and then she understood.
	"Rest here tonight," he said, his voice hushed out of
deference to the place's specialness.  "It'll keep the noise down so
that you can find your center again.  You've been connected like this
before, and you learned to live with it.  Take tonight to remember how
you did that.  Or take as long as you like.  You won't be bothered
here."
	Jean smiled and settled back into the anti-gravity field that
substituted for furniture in this room of engineered perfect peace.
	"Thank you," she said quietly.
	Don grinned.  "You're welcome, Mom," he said, and flippantly
bent to kiss her on the forehead.
	Abruptly his lives flashed before him, the way old books
always say they do when death is imminent - from his childhood in
Maine through his days at Xavier's, his first death in the future New
York, Excalibur, the Vortex, his second death, his New Avalon wedding,
dinner last night, everything.
	And as that all rushed past his senses, so did -another-
life.  Growing up in upstate New York, watching a best friend die, the
earliest days of Xavier's School, death and rebirth and saying goodbye
to Scott - not HIS life, but JEAN'S!
	He recoiled, the eternal experience over in a half-second, and
they blinked at each other in mutual unadulterated shock.
	"That's... "  Don took a half-step back, stumbled, and sat
down heavily on the floor, the "furniture field" not quick enough to
catch up with an accidental fall.  "... not supposed to happen."
	"My God," Jean murmured.  "Don, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to
do that - it's just - I don't have control, and the room - you're the
only signal I - "
	Don shook his head and clambered to his feet.  "It's OK," he
said, though he sounded shaken yet.  "I know you wouldn't do something
like that on purpose... I was just... shocked.  It's not supposed to
happen to me.  I've always been immune.  Even when I -wanted- Ray to
read me, she couldn't.  Even Professor X can't."
	"It... "  Jean blinked again.  "It must be... because of
Rachel," she said.
	Don considered that, shook his head again to clear it.  "Could
be," he admitted.  "I don't know.  We'll have to look into it later.
For right now my first priority is gathering up our friends again."
	Jean nodded.  "Agreed.  Don... I really am sorry.  I promise
you, anything I may have learned that's... that's personal, that's
private, will never be passed on."
	Don smiled.  "I know it won't.  It's OK, Jean.  Same goes for
me."  He sighed, shivered theatrically, and wiped a hand down his
face.  "I wasn't tired when Hank sent me to bed, but I am now.  See
you in the morning, Jean, if you're up to it.  If you don't feel up to
it when I knock, just say so."
	The redheaded telepath smiled, and Don was reminded - more
vividly than usual, thanks to the experience he'd just had - that Ray
had gotten her smile from her mother.
	"I think I'll be fine in a few hours.  Good night, Don."
	"Good night, Jean."  He went to the door, then paused and
turned back.  "Oh, and, uh... "  He hesitated, feeling awkward, but
then pressed on, "Believe it or not... I'm sorry about Scott."
	Jean nodded, her smile a little sad.  "I know you are.  Good
night."

	He must still have looked a little shell-shocked when he
entered his stateroom and shut the door behind him.  Kitty, who was
sitting up in bed reading, put aside her book, looked up and said,
	"What's the matter with you?  You look like you saw a ghost."
	"I did," Don replied, tossing his coat over a chair and then
bending down to unlace his boots.  As he undressed he told her what
had happened.
	Some guys might have tried to downplay little things like the
sudden discovery of a psychic link with another woman, but that wasn't
the kind of relationship he and Kitty had, thank Omega.  He laid it all
out for her, and she took it all in, frowning thoughtfully and tapping
at her chin with the ball of her thumb.
	"Hmm," she said as Don finished his recital, switched off the
light, and climbed into bed.  "Sounds like you guys have some things
to talk about once this is all over with."
	"I imagine so," he mused, arranging himself as Kitty slipped
into his arms.  She had a way of doing that so that, once she was
settled, it seemed like she'd just appeared there, and at the same
time, like she'd always been there.  He'd asked her about it once, and
she'd giggled and said it was a secret ninja snuggling technique.
	"Well, we'll deal with it," she said practically.  "After all,
Jean's family."
	Don chuckled.  As usual, she'd gone right to the heart of the
matter, in words more succinct and direct than he could even have
thought of.
	Of course they'd deal with it; Jean was family.
	"I'm more concerned about the way you've been scoping out the
young stuff," Kitty went on, a mischievous edge in her voice.  Tracing
a little circle on his chest with a fingertip, she went on, "I realize
I've been spending a lot of time on my studies lately, but if I'm not
keeping you interested, I wish you'd let me know."
	Don sputtered a bit, which was just what she was after.
	"Oh, I don't blame you," she went on when he'd stopped trying
to form a protest.  "The change in Rahne -is- dramatic; why, I'd be
willing to bet she's only -conservative- now.  And as for Paige,
well... "  She looked up at his face, her eyes twinkling in the
nightlight.  "I happen to know you have a special -weakness- for
smart, tough women, and she's all that."
	"And a bag of chips," said Don with a chuckle.  "I don't know
what it is, must be something that runs in that family.  They start
out as cute kids, then they go through this kind of gawky phase, and
then... "
	"Bam," said Kitty, laughing.  Then, to get in one last poke,
she added, "Yeah, I bet Sam's just to -die- for these days... but I
think I'll stick with what I've got for a while longer, anyway," she
added.
	"Well," Don mused lightly, "that's good to hear, I suppose."

			  CLOUD CITY, BESPIN
			       9:04 AM

	Sam Guthrie woke from the best night's sleep he'd had in
months, sat up, yawned, stretched, and looked around himself.  He was
in the single plushest bedroom he'd ever seen, a spectacle of opulence
so grand that he couldn't really take it in all at once, with a huge
window that looked out on the pastel-touched expanse of the city in
the sky and the endless clouds beyond.
	He still wasn't sure where he was - he had access to a
well-connected library terminal here in the room, but without context,
all the information he'd pulled up on it had been pretty well
meaningless.  What he knew for certain was that he for -sure- wasn't
on Earth, or anywhere terribly near it.
	Most of the people here were human, though, and they spoke a
language that, while slightly clipped to Sam's ears, was
understandable enough.  And, what was more, they had been -damn- glad
to see him.  When he'd wandered into the nearest establishment he
could find after coming to, and the man at the desk had asked his name
and he'd given it out of sheer reflex, the whole staff had snapped to
and ushered him to this magnificent room.
	Girls had appeared from nowhere and waited on him hand and
foot, every one of them young, every one lovely.  After giving him the
world's best bath, wrapping him up in the softest imaginable white
terry robe, and stuffing him full of incredibly good food, a couple of
them had come right out and said that if there was anything -else-
Mr. Guthrie wanted, he had only to ask.
	He'd been too flustered to take anybody up on it, and so now
he awoke alone.  Piled on the desk at the far side of the room, where
the terminal was, were the clothes he'd arrived in - his beat-up old
black leather bomber jacket, his well-traveled favorite boots, and an
X-Men battle costume which had, thanks to the very long day he'd been
having, seen better days.
	Still very puzzled but not the sort to question good fortune,
Sam went into the bathroom, figured out how to use the shaving gizmo,
and had an utterly perfect shower, then came back out to get dressed
and discovered that his clothes had been not only cleaned, not only
mended, but practically -rejuvenated-.  The leather of jacket and
boots didn't shine like new, but the patina of their long use had been
nicely polished up, and the uniform had been repaired so well it was
impossible to tell where it had been damaged.
	Clean and dressed, Sam felt ready to face the day.  The first
order of business was to get some breakfast, and after
that... answers.
	Unfortunately, he was to get neither.
	As he entered the hotel lobby, bound for the restaurant, a
tall, voluptuous woman in a gaudy sequined gown bustled toward him,
her ring-encrusted fingers glinting in the pastel light coming through
the skylights as she approached.
	"My dear, -dear- Mr. Guthrie!" she gushed.  "How simply
delightful to see you gracing my establishment at last.  I'm Marya
Telluris, I'm the manager of the Cloud Nine.  I trust everything was
to your liking last night?  Of course I'd have come myself to welcome
you, but - can you believe - no one told us you were coming!"  She
laughed, an intimate little ha-ha-ha that said, "Those silly servants;
it's so hard to get good help these days, isn't it?  We understand
these problems, old boy."
	Sam nodded politely - whatever the circumstances, he was
almost always polite - and replied, "Thank you, ma'am, but that wasn't
necessary.  I had a fine evening indeed, and I want to thank you
kindly for your hospitality."
	"Oh, thanks aren't necessary," said Telluris airily, laying a
hand on his arm in a confidential manner.  "We're all so very pleased
to have the great Samuel J. Guthrie visit our establishment."
	Sam looked quizzical.  "I'm sorry, ma'am, but I'm afraid
there might be some mistake."
	"Excuse me?" said Marya Telluris, a trace of worry entering
her green eyes.
	"I say I'm afraid there might be some mistake," Sam went on.
"Y'see, ma'am, I'm Samuel -Z.- Guthrie.  I'm starting to suspect as
maybe your staff mistook me for somebody else last night."
	The woman removed her hand from his arm, took a step back, and
regarded him with a face that was rapidly becoming forbidding.
	"You slept in our -finest- suite," she said, her voice growing
colder with each word, "you availed yourself of all the services this
establishment had to offer, you ate two thousand credits' worth of the
finest foods of the galaxy - "
	"(Two -thousand-... ?)" Sam mouthed silently, his blond
eyebrows shooting up his forehead.
	" - and now you tell me you are NOT Samuel Johnstone Guthrie,
the Corellian dilithium baron?" Telluris demanded shrilly.
	Sam shook his head.  "No, ma'am.  I'm Samuel Zachariah Guthrie
from West Virginia, and I ain't any kind of baron.  I'm awful sorry
for the mix-up, but y'see, nobody ever asked me - "
	Telluris cut him off, snapping harshly, "Not as sorry as
you're -going- to be, young man.  FRONT!"
	A man in a bellhop's uniform appeared at her elbow.  "Yes,
Ms. Telluris?"
	"Get a Judge.  Quickly, now!"
	"Yes, ma'am," said the bellhop, and he vanished with the same
alacrity he'd arrived with.
	Sam tried to protest several times, but the woman refused to
listen to him, and a few moments later the bellhop returned with a
burly man in an eyecatching uniform.
	The man was a little over six feet tall, not as tall as Sam
but much more broadly built, and he was wearing a dark blue uniform
with a lot of brass buckles and things, an equipment belt covered in
various intimidating bits of gear, huge, chunky boots, and a helmet
that covered his eyes and nose, leaving his only facial feature a
scowling mouth with deep frown lines embedded at the corners.  He had
a gold eagle on one shoulder and a heavy epaulet on the other, and a
large badge on his chest, attached to the eagle's talon with a chain,
read "TAVERNER" in big block letters.
	"Is there some problem?" this figure said in a rough,
street-tough sort of voice.
	"This young man," said Marya Telluris, pointing an accusing,
ring-becrusted finger like a talon at Sam, "has defrauded my
establishment out of fourteen thousand credits' worth of goods and
services by impersonating a valued customer."
	Judge Taverner turned his visored face to Sam.  "Is that true,
son?" he asked, keeping his right hand near his enormous holstered
pistol.
	"Well, I s'pose so, sir, technically, but it ain't like she
says," Sam said.  "I didn't know they'd taken me for someone else.  I
thought... "  He hesitated slightly.  He couldn't say "I thought I'd
been blown clear to Asgard, where they know me, and this was just
their way of saying 'welcome back,'" even though that -had- been his
train of slightly muddled thought the previous night.  "... some
friends of mine had laid it on for me as a surprise," he said.
	"A likely story," Telluris snapped.  "He came in here last
night, according to my night manager, and said he was Sam Guthrie."
	"I -am- Sam Guthrie!"
	"Not the one who's worth 12 billion credits," Telluris shot
back venomously.  "Now you'll claim that you thought we'd put on a
welcome like the one you got for any common fool off the street?"
	"Well, -I- would," Sam allowed.
	Telluris snorted.  "You were probably just going to walk right
out the door and disappear.  It was just luck that I happened to be
hoping to meet you - I mean the REAL Sam Guthrie - and caught you
before you could get away with it.  Take him away, Judge."
	Taverner turned his head and gave the hotel manager a glare
she and Sam could both feel through his blank visor.  "When I complete
my investigation," he said carefully, "then I'll decide what to do.
Mr. Guthrie, are you able to pay your bill?"
	"No sir, not with money," Sam replied, shaking his head.  "I
ain't got a cent.  Like I say, I thought some friends of mine had laid
all this on for me.  But I pay my debts," he added, raising his chin
and looking the man straight in the smoked glass where his eyes should
be.  "I ain't a thief, and I ain't afraid of hard work.  I can make up
whatever Ms. Telluris says I owe her."
	"Not likely," Telluris said, elevating her own chin to look
down (or rather along, since they were about the same height) her nose
at him.  "You'll never be welcome in my establishment again.  I'll see
you blacklisted throughout the industry!"
	Taverner turned back to the manager.  "He says he's willing to
work off his debt.  Are you insisting on charges?"
	"Of course I am!  This kind of rabble can't be sent the
message that they can pull this kind of fraud on a hotel of this
caliber and then shrug it off by washing a few dishes."
	The Judge regarded her with his unreadable face for a few
moments, then turned to Sam and said, "You've confessed to grand
larceny.  Seven weeks hard labor.  Let's go."
	For a second, Sam considered protesting, even making a fight
of it - but only for a second.  This guy was apparently the law here,
wherever the hell he was, and he -had- ripped these people off, even
if he hadn't meant to and even if the value the woman was putting on
what he'd received did strike him as completely unreasonable.  (Then
again, how was he to know how much 14,000 credits were worth?)
	He sighed, shrugged, and went quietly.
	"Don't worry about it too much, son," said the Judge when they
were out of earshot of the hotel.  "I know why she's doing it.  She
wants to keep it quiet that she and her staff gave 14 grand worth of
service to some random guy off the street without checking his ID.
It'd make them the laughingstock of the industry around here.  Seven
weeks isn't that long, and you look like a smart, tough kid.  You'll
make it."
	"Uh... thank you, sir," said Sam, since it seemed like the
thing to say.  The Judge smiled tightly below his helmet but said
nothing, and the rest of their short walk down the street to the local
Justice Center was a silent one.
	"As for La Telluris's reputation, well... " Judge Taverner
murmured, as if to himself.  Then he pushed the doors open, making as
much noise as possible, and hauled Sam into the station lobby with a
maximum of ostentation.
	"Here's our perp," he said in a loud voice guaranteed to catch
the attention of the loungers, idlers, minor crooks and reporters
loitering in the lobby.  He propelled Sam roughly (but not too
roughly, and Sam stumbled a bit to make it a good show) toward the
desk, where another Judge sat in a non-armored duty uniform.  "Process
him for the mines.  He just bilked the Cloud Nine out of 14 large by
pretending to be Sam Guthrie, the dilithium magnate."
	The desk Judge snorted convulsively, nearly propelling his
klah onto his monitor screen.  "They thought this -kid- was Dilithium
Guthrie?!"
	"Yeah, go figure," said Taverner.  "I gave him seven weeks in
the mines.  See that he's down there and working within the hour, will
you, Barrymore?"
	"Will do, Taverner.  Good pinch."
	"I've had worse," Taverner allowed modestly.  As he passed
Sam, heading for the locker rooms in back, he clapped the X-Man
discreetly on the shoulder, leaned toward him, and murmured,
"(Remember what I said, son.  Keep your wits, do your work, and you'll
make it.)"
	"(Yessir, I'll remember,)" Sam replied.  "(Thanks.)"
	"(Don't thank me,)" Taverner muttered.  "(I just enforce the
Law the best way I know how.)"

			      THE TARDIS
			 INTERSTITIAL VORTEX
		  8:40 AM (RELATIVE NEW AVALON TIME)

	Don came into the control room in bathrobe and slippers,
scrubbing at his hair with a towel, to find the Beast stretched on the
couch, most of the way through Louise Dickinson Rich's "We Took to the
Woods".
	"Good morning, Dr. Griffin," he said, tucking a bookmark into
the book and sitting up.  "I trust you had a pleasant night's sleep?"
	"Good morning, Dr. McCoy," Don replied.  "Not bad at all.  I
let Kitty sleep.  How are you holding up?"
	"Not bad, not bad.  I must say, this Rich woman was an
extraordinary sort of person.  Perhaps I should buy a cabin in the
woods - although a TARDIS in temporal orbit does make for an admirable
retreat in its own way," McCoy added.  "I haven't been paged once
since this trip began.  It's been quite restful, though I shudder to
think what my desk will look like when I get back to the Institute."
	"How'd she do?"
	"Nary a hitch nor a mumble.  There was another hit on the
locator about an hour ago, though."
	"Oh?"  Don peered into the tracking viewer.  "Hmm.  Bespin
system.  Well, that one won't be hard to find; there's only one
inhabitable place in that system.  Not too far out of our way; might
as well swing by and pick up whoever it is on our way to New Avalon.
They probably won't be as well-rested as the rest of us... "
	The Beast shrugged.  "That's life in the big city," he said.
	Don chuckled.  "You got that from me," he said, and then
adjusted a few of the flight controls and stood back with a satisfied
smile.  "The old girl's holding up pretty well for her age," he said,
patting the console, "especially when you consider the knocks she's
taken along the way."
	"I suppose I'll take that as a compliment," said an amused
voice from the interior door.  Don and Hank turned to see Jean Grey
smiling at them from the doorway.  She'd scrounged a green terry robe
from one of the wardrobe rooms, and wore bath slippers and a turban
made from a yellow towel.
	"Morning, Jean," said Don, a touch diffidently, but she only
smiled some more, crossed the room, and gave him a kiss on the cheek,
as though to prove she could without anything weird happening.  Then
she gave the Beast one as well.
	"Morning, boys," she said cheerfully.  "I don't know about
you, but I feel like a new woman."
	"That would be... difficult to adjust to, but not totally
unheard of," said Don uncomfortably.
	"I'm already a new Beast," McCoy protested.  "Don't push me in
unexpected directions."  He raised an eyebrow at Don.  "Not totally
unheard of?"
	"Time Lords have been known to switch at regeneration," Don
explained, "but the phenomenon is rare, and usually happens at the
very first regeneration - as a sort of self-correction, you see."
	McCoy nodded sagely.  "And so I accumulate another fact for my
burgeoning bank of facts I would probably have been better off not
knowing."
	"You think YOU would've been better off?" Griffin inquired
archly.  "It happened to one of my classmates."
	Jean laughed.  "Well, boys, now that I've started you down
this road, I'm off to find something to wear."  She breezed out of the
control room, and as soon as she was gone, McCoy gave Don a
speculative look.
	"She seems to be feeling much better this morning," he mused.
	"So she does."
	"And she hasn't even had breakfast yet.  She's usually a
bigger bear than I am before she gets her first cup of coffee."
	"Mm."
	"You're not going to say a thing about it, are you."
	"Nope."
	"Hum.  ... One of your classmates, eh?"
	"Mm.  Jamie always was a little odd.  She used to say that she
was a lesbian trapped in a man's body.  We all thought she was
kidding... "

			      CLOUD CITY
			       1:15 PM

	"Hard labor" on Cloud City turned out to be duty in the city's
tibanna gas mine.  Tibanna gas, the ten-minute "new employee"
orientation had informed Sam Guthrie, is the backbone of a number of
high-energy technologies, most famously blaster weapons, and is a
valuable and indispensible commodity in modern society, which is why
YOU lawbreaking scum have been selected for the honor of harvesting it
from the upper atmosphere of the third planet of the Bespin system.
	The reason the Justice Department used mainly prisoners to do
the grunt work in the gas mine was because mining was dangerous.  Sam,
having been a miner himself (albeit not one in such an exotic setting
as this), knew that full well.
	It was somewhat -more- dangerous up here, where the work was
done in the open air on catwalks and platforms stretching for miles
along the underside of Cloud City, with nothing beyond their
guardrails but yawning emptiness four miles down to the pink, fluffy
clouds of Bespin III, and nothing below -that- but... well, the things
you found as you penetrated deeper into a gas giant.
	Not a good way to go.
	"Now, in case any of you fellows have any bright ideas about
having your friends fly down here and 'rescue' you from falling, and
then 'forget' to return you to your lawfully assigned penal servitude,
the Department of Justice has a little surprise for you," the
duty-uniformed Judge in charge of prisoner processing had told Sam's
entering "class" of 25.
	"Built into the monitoring collar you are wearing is a shaped
charge of Plitex Nine high explosive," the processing Judge went on.
"In the event that you move more than three miles from your assigned
duty area, that charge will detonate, severing your head in a
nanosecond.  If you are out of contact with the deck surface of your
work area for 30 seconds or more, the same fate awaits you."  The
Judge had then smiled nastily.  "So let's all be careful out there."
	And indeed Sam was careful - careful, and attentive to
orders and instructions.  By lunchtime on his first day he had already
earned a reputation as a good, hard worker, diligent and biddable,
with a good head for the intricacies of the gas-mining process.  He
wasn't like the other hardcases down here; all the guards and the
foreman agreed on that.
	As the crew broke for lunch on the main platform, the big
hexagonal ring around the main beam drill, Sam sat down and broke open
his lunch kit, which had been issued with his prisoner's orange
uniform and tracking collar that morning.  The food was decent, but
nothing to write home about.  Sam wondered where he was, but no
talking was allowed among the workers during the shift, so he wouldn't
have an opportunity to find out until barracks call tonight.
	Behind him, he heard something like a scuffle, and turned
around to see a couple of his fellow prisoners - a big blue guy named
Krychuk and a skinny, rat-faced individual named Baumer - squared off
as though ready to come to blows.  Between them lay a spilled food
pack.
	The guards moved in, but stood off - they liked to watch
fights as disparate as this one for a while before breaking them up.
Sam's first impulse was to get in there and try to break it up, but he
checked himself.  What would that serve except to turn the lot of them
against him?  Instead, he sat back down and resumed eating his lunch.
None of his business anyway.
	A few seconds later, he heard the sound of a heavy blow, then
another, and then a terrified scream which brought him instantly to
his feet and back around again.
	The guards were racing toward Krychuk, their stun rods
crackling.  The big man stood at the edge of the drill hole at the
center of the platform.
	Baumer was nowhere to be seen.
	Without a moment's hesitation, Sam Guthrie dropped his lunch,
turned around, climbed the safety railing around the outer edge of the
platform, and jumped into space.

     /*  Steve Vai  "Greasy Kid's Stuff"  _Passion & Warfare_  */

	Well, not so much jumped as "exploded".  As he cleared the
rail, a visible energy field surrounded him, and with a sound like an
unshielded rocket engine, he streaked downward, leaving a trail of
smoke and flame behind him.
	This was why Sam Guthrie's friends called him Cannonball.
	There was Baumer, far below, kicking and flailing as he
plunged toward the clouds.  He would pass the invisible barrier long
before he ever got there, of course, and the two parts of him would
fall separately the rest of the way, unless Sam could catch him before
he got there.
	Every second he blasted sent -Sam- hurtling closer to the
invisible line as well, and his blasting field, which made him pretty
much invulnerable, was -outside- the collar; it wouldn't save him from
the harshness of Zardon escape management practices.
	He didn't think about that.  He didn't try to keep track of
his distance or his elapsed time, with an eye toward aborting the
rescue if he got too close to either line.  He just poured it on,
giving it everything he had, exulting in the freedom even as most of
his mind was laser-focused on the job he had to do.
	Up on the platform, the guards and other prisoners lined the
drill hole, staring wide-eyed into the space below the platform,
watching Cannonball go.  In seconds, he'd caught up to the falling
prisoner.
	"He's gonna do it," one of the guards murmured, awestruck.
	"No he ain't," one of the prisoners said, shaking his head.
"They're both dead meat."
	"Two more months says you're wrong," said the guard, not
taking his eyes off the scene.
	"Two hundred credits says I'm right," the prisoner replied.
	"Done," said the guard, and at that moment Sam intercepted
Baumer.
	This was the tricky part; he couldn't grab the falling felon
with his blasting field up, so he had to cut his thrust - which would
subject him to atmospheric buffeting for however long it took him to
grab Baumer.  There, too, if Baumer was in a blind panic, he might
flail and make himself impossible to grab onto.
	At the speed Sam was going, he was more worried about breaking
something hitting him.
	The two men collided violently, but Sam got his shoulder into
it and took the hit as though he were making a football tackle.
Baumer cried out and went limp, stunned by the blow, as the lanky West
Virginian's shoulder rammed into his middle.  Sam looped one long arm
around Baumer's waist and kicked his power in again, this time
blasting full force to stop his fall and take him back up.
	Up they came, eluding the first of the dangers - but how long
had it been since Baumer fell?  How long had it taken Sam to catch
him?  Certainly not 30 seconds, at least Sam didn't -think- so, but
what was the gravity here?  It felt pretty much normal, but who was
Sam to say?
	The other tricky part was getting back onto the platform
without ramming into the underside of the city, and at one time, Sam
would have lacked the fine control to do that.  Years of training and
practice had given him mastery of his flight, though, and he landed
without incident, touching down not far from the knot of guards.
	To his surprise, there were three other figures standing there
too, people who hadn't been on the platform when he'd left it.  One
was Judge Taverner; the others... 
	"Sam!" cried Paige Guthrie, darting forward and throwing her
arms around her brother.  "Sam, you crazy fool," she said, raising her
face to his, "that was the craziest, bravest thing I've ever seen
anybody do."
	Sam grinned.  He knew it was hyperbole - Paige was an X-Man,
after all, she'd seen plenty of crazy brave things - but it was nice
to hear a compliment from his little sister all the same.
	"Well, hey, Paige," he said with affected nonchalance.  "I'm
glad to see you too."  He held her at arms' length for a moment, his
hands on her shoulders, and looked her over with a bemused look.
"What've they got you wearin' now, girl?"
	"Do you like it?" Paige asked with a touch of a blush.
"Jubilee helped me pick it out."
	"Did she now," said Sam thoughtfully.  "I think I'm gonna have
to have a talk with that one when I get outta here."
	"You're out now," said Judge Taverner.  The smiling Judge
unlocked Sam's prisoner collar and, with a flourish, tossed it over
the railing.  "Sentence commuted to time served.  Anyway, your friend
here paid your bill."
	"What the hell," asked Don Griffin with a grin, "did you DO to
rack up a 14,000-credit bill?  Or shouldn't I ask you that in front of
your sister?"
	"Don't you start with me, Mr. Griffin," said Sam, shaking the
Time Lord's offered hand.  "Good to see you're not dead, by the way."
	"I think so every morning," said Griffin.  "Shall we?"
	Down below, there was the muffled "pop" of a small explosion.

	The next couple of days were very busy ones for everybody, but
the details will be of little interest to anyone other than the
various customs and immigration personnel involved.  They were
certainly of little interest to the displaced X-Men, who would have
preferred, by and large, to be out exploring New Avalon.
	They got their chance on Sunday afternoon, when temporary
billeting arrangements had finally been worked out, most of the forms
had been processed, and the IPO's orientation officers had signed off
on their initial surveys to the Chief.  Most of them were staying at
the Monolith until they could get on their feet, courtesy of the
International Police.  A couple were already looking around the city
for other places to stay.
	Sam Guthrie went to Claremont, the thoroughly bohemian
neighborhood not far from downtown on the Oxbow River, and stayed with
old friends - Kurt Wagner and Piotr Rasputin, who had come in the
initial wave and who shared a townhouse at Brantner and Strange, by
the river.  Wagner wasn't home much, since he was an Expert of Justice
for the IPO, but Rasputin welcomed his little sister Illyana's old
teammate into his home with open arms.
	The big Russian, who worked as an artist for the Bacon Comics
Group, was eager for news of his sister, whom he hadn't seen since his
displacement five years before.  She, like Cannonball, had "graduated"
to the X-Men while Piotr was in England as part of Excalibur, and
according to Sam she was doing well.  He didn't know if she'd been
displaced, but Don was still looking, he said, and there was hope yet.
	Sam's sister Paige went to live with the Griffins, at least
temporarily, while she decided what she wanted to do next with her
life.  That was something she'd never really had to think about
before.  Sure, she'd pursued her education as a member of Generation
X, and then as an X-Man, but it was sort of as a matter of form,
hedging her bets against a future she never really thought would
arrive, a future where she could have a normal life.
	And now, through some strange twists and turns, here she was.
Nobody -cared- here that she was born with a power normal members of
her species didn't have, or if they did care, they just thought it was
-cool-.  She could use her abilities to benefit society, and she
would, because that was the way she was brought up and it was a
rightness and a truth she believed in; but she no longer had to devote
her -entire life- to that cause, because the pressure of the Mutant
Problem was, without comment, entirely gone.
	She spent Sunday evening, after a cheerful dinner with her
brother, the Griffins, Rasputin, and Wagner, reading up on the various
threats and menaces that -did- exist in this world, trying to decide
where to go next.  Like all the displaced X-Men, she'd been offered a
place in the International Police, as a more-or-less-free agent with
the latitude to live her own life and blend it with the IPO mission of
freedom and peace as best she could.  The question was, would she take
it?
	"Well, kiddo," said Kitty Griffin with a yawn, "don't stay up
too late, huh?  I'll be heading for the lab pretty early in the
morning.  I'll try not to wake you, but no promises," she said,
cracking a grin.
	Paige laughed.  "I'll get to bed soon," she promised.  "I just
want to finish the chapter on Big Fire."

			NEW AVALON, ZETA CYGNI
		       MONDAY, AUGUST 20, 2407
			       3:17 PM

	Monday was a quiet, lazy sort of day at Don and Kitty
Griffin's apartment in the Millrace.  They had half of the top floor
of a building constructed to resemble a decommissioned woolen mill,
which suited them well enough.  Lately they'd been talking about
buying a house, but had decided to wait until Kitty decided where she
was going to do her doctorate work, and got a little closer to the
time for actually doing it.
	Kitty got up in the morning and caught the N out to the New
Avalon Institute of Science, there to continue her work on expert
systems and interface technology.  Don and Paige Guthrie spent most of
the day on the sofas in the living room, reading.  At quarter past
three in the afternoon, Don was starting to entertain the notion of
calling Kitty and asking if she wanted to catch the Knights game that
evening when something in the room beeped.
	Don got up and rummaged around on the end table for a moment,
coming up with his watch.  This he perused thoughtfully while Paige
put a finger in her book and watched him; then he made a quiet
exclamation and headed for the TARDIS, which was parked, slightly
incongruously, in the kitchen.
	"What's going on?" Paige asked as she followed him into the
control room.  Don figured he knew, but didn't answer until he'd
looked into the sensor-panel viewer and confirmed his suspicion.
	"The logfile trace turned up another one.  Probably the last
one we'll get... it's near the bottom of the file, and... "  He
whistled.  "Way the hell out beyond the Outer Rim Territories.
Planet's not even charted."  He turned to Paige, shrugging.  "You up
for a trip beyond the Rim?"
	"Sure," she said.  "Just us?"
	Don shook his head.  "I don't like tackling an unknown
situation like that with just a couple of people.  Let me call Kitty
and see if she can get away."

	Kitty could not only get away, she brought a little more
backup with her.  Logan, unlike the Beast and Jubilee, hadn't headed
back to Tomodachi yet, having been kept in New Avalon over the
weekend by by some kind of mysterious business.  (Logan was often in
places other than where he was expected to be, on some kind of
mysterious business.) 
	Twenty minutes' worth of phone calls and Lens contacts while
Kitty was on her way in turned up no other immediately available help;
Paige's fellow displacees were either back in orientation or "out
ramming around," as Don put it, and everyone else they tried was
either tied up with something else or too far away to be of any help.
So, shrugging metaphorically, they piled into the TARDIS and headed
out.

		   BEYOND THE OUTER RIM TERRITORIES
		      7:15 PM (NEW AVALON TIME)

	Don stood at the control console looking over the readings on
the planet on which the TARDIS had just materialized.  He knew nothing
about what they might expect here, which wasn't his favorite way to
tackle a job.  This star system wasn't charted, might not even have
been -entered- by anyone from a modern civilization.  It had a name,
just the name of the astronomer who discovered it and a designator,
but nothing at all was known about the planets.
	His companions were taking no chances.  Kitty had put on her
working clothes, complete with the mask which was of no particular use
anymore, but without which she felt the outfit was incomplete.  She
had her sword on her back and Lockheed on her shoulder, which was as
loaded for bear as she ever got.  So, too, Paige had donned the
modified Kryptonian uniform Jubilee had found for her.
	Wolverine wasn't having any of that; he'd given up dressing
like a comic-book superhero the instant he no longer had to do so, to
his great relief.  As he'd said to Don at the time, "Me in a mask?
Who did Charley think we were foolin'?"  Now, he wore the same clothes
on the job he wore everywhere else, except in the dojo as NIT's kendo
coach: jeans, work boots, flannel shirts and old motorcycle jackets.
	"Hmm," Don mused.  "Well, atmospheric composition, temperature,
and pressure are all green, and gravity shows point nine four of
Standard.  So... "
	Don tripped the main door activator and led the way outside,
saying as he cleared the outer door, "Welcome to Wachowski-MX74 IV."
	The four X-Men emerged from the TARDIS... and stared.  Don's
TARDIS had a fine sense of the dramatic, it seemed, for it had
materialized on a rocky ridgeline overlooking a city.
	Or at least, what was left of one.

      /*  W.A. Mozart  "Kyrie"  _Requiem in D minor, KV626_  */

	Sprawling out before them, as far as the eye could see, were
the ruins of what had obviously been a great city once.  Blackened
spires, heaps of rubble, and the barely visible outlines of
debris-strewn streets were scattered across the black, forbidding
landscape.  Great towers, some of them obviously missing upper spans,
leaned drunkenly against each other or jutted up jaggedly into the
sky.
	The sky was no better, a poisonous, roiling grey shot through
with white lightning - a thick, dark thunderstorm without rain,
stretching from horizon to horizon.
	"... my... God," Don murmured, walking slowly out to the edge
of the ridgeline.
	"Doesn't look like He's been here for a while," said Logan
darkly.
	"Does... this look familiar... to anyone?" Don asked in a
soft, shaken voice.
	No one answered.  No one had to.  Two of them had seen a vista
like this before, and the other had heard the stories.  Kitty Griffin
closed her eyes for a moment, as if hoping that when she opened them,
the shattered city would be gone; but with her eyes closed, she only
saw death - first Logan, then Don - and she decided she preferred the
ruins.
	Faced with this vision, so like the distant place where he had
died for the first time, some nameless dread reared up inside Donald
Griffin, and he heeded it.  With a sizzling display of energy, his
armored suit materialized around him, sheathing him in powered metal
and providing him with some of the galaxy's most sophisticated and
powerful weapons.
	A moment later, something raised itself up from the valley in
front of him.
	It was a mechanoid, with a vaguely spherical main body about
three feet across.  The front of this body was covered with a
random-looking assortment of odd-sized red photoreceptors, and had a
"beard" of weirdly twitching little mechanical odds and ends -
antennae, perhaps, or fine manipulators, or both.  From the back of it
sprouted a dozen segmented metal tentacles that reminded Don of Doctor
Octopus's extra limbs.
	For a moment, the armored X-Man and the mechanical squid
regarded each other with silent puzzlement.
	The robot emitted a squeal of digital noise - some kind of
friend-or-foe interrogative, probably.  Griffin's computer system
recorded it and began analyzing it, but made no response.
	That didn't seem to satisfy the squid robot.  After a moment,
it repeated its query; then, getting no answer, it acted.  A scarlet
line of laser fire slashed out from a projector under the robot's
"chin", splashed from the reflective, angled surface of the GRF-3N
suit's chestplate, and burned a line across the ground at Griffin's
feet.
	Stymied in that attempt, the robot reared back slightly on its
humming repulsor field and lashed several of its arms around, raining
clanging, sparking blows on Griffin.  He stood absolutely still and
took them, not even raising his arms to ward off the blows, while his
enemy assessment computer gathered more data on the robot's
construction.
	Then, without further comment, he raised his left arm - the
one with the heavy particle cannon gripped in its gauntlet - and blew
a hole clean through the center of the thing's body.  It sparked,
twitched, and then dropped out of sight like a stone, trailing behind
it a thick plume of black smoke and the metallic sounds of its carcass
rebounding from rocks as it fell down the cliff.
	"Well," he said, his voice slightly flattened by the suit
amplifiers.  "That answers -that-."  He turned back to the ruined
city, gazing silently off into the distance through his mirrored
faceplate.  "I'm picking up more of them.  Too many for my battle
computer to track."
	"How many is too many?" wondered Paige.
	"For the Mark 14?" Griffin replied unenthusiastically.
"Hundreds.  Maybe thousands."
	"... Oh."
	"Some are headed this way," said Griffin, "but the biggest
concentration of them is... -there-."  He pointed toward a spot in
the city.  "Hopefully, that means whoever we're here to pick up is
still alive."  He fell silent for a moment, scanning, and then said,
"OK, there's an intact tunnel system under the city.  Odds are our
target is down there."
	Wolverine unsheathed his claws.  Even under the circumstances,
Shadowcat smiled slightly, reflecting, not for the first time, what an
oddly reassuring sound that was if you knew what it was.
	"Let's get lookin', then," said Logan.

	Emma Frost was, indeed, still alive, but she could not be said
to be having a good day.
	Granted, she hadn't had a very good day the previous day,
either.  Emma was a naturally irritable sort of person a lot of the
time, and ending up on a deserted island, up to one's hips in
gun-toting paramilitary types and giant mutant-killing robots, isn't
really fun for anyone.
	What had happened to her since the sky turned orange, though,
that just took the biscuit.  Emma Frost was -not- the sort of person
to take kindly to waking up in a dark, dank tunnel, lying in a pool of
filthy water, being dripped on by a piece of metallic rubbish hanging
from the tunnel ceiling.
	When she got over being mad about it, though, she'd realized
that there was something deeply unsettling about the whole situation.
The realization had come slowly, as she picked her way through the
dark cavern, making her way toward what she hoped was the surface, a
process which took the better part of a day.  It came first as a
semiconscious sense that something wasn't right, then as a gnawing
suspicion, then as a cold, fearful certainty.
	Wherever she was - and from what she could make out of the
tunnel in the dark, that was almost certainly under a city - there
were no people there.  None.
	Emma's telepathic "radar" was completely blank.  There were no
other minds for miles around.
	That had almost frightened her, so she'd changed, converting
her body to a form which resembled diamond in composition.  Not only
was this form a lot tougher than her normal body, it also blanked out
her telepathic powers and flattened most of her emotional responses,
so the lack of psychic signatures around her no longer bothered
her... or at least, not as much.
	The shift had saved her life.  She hadn't been on the surface,
marveling in a detached, crystalline sort of way at the devastation,
for more than an hour when the first of the robotic squid had
encountered her.  It hadn't seemed to know what to make of her at
first, probably because her biosignature was as attenuated as her
emotions in her diamond form, but it hadn't taken the thing long to
decide to attack.
	Emma Frost was no fool.  She'd destroyed the first one with
guile and some strategic uses of rubble, but more had arrived, first a
few, then a lot.  Knowing that she couldn't destroy them all, she'd
retreated into the tunnels, trying to hide.
	The things were damnably good at tracking.  They'd quartered
her, blocked her in, and now they had her.  Emma's diamond form was
very durable, and her fingernails quite sharp, but she hadn't any
particular boost in strength from the change.  She was bottled up at a
heavy grating which blocked the tunnel, and the squiddies, as she'd
mentally dubbed them, were everywhere.
	They seethed and flailed and grabbed.  One of them tried to
cut her heart out with its laser weapon.  Instinctively, she twisted
her body, trying to twist away from the path of the beam as it touched
the skin of her chest.
	It refracted within her crystal body and emerged at a sharp
angle, carving another of the squiddies in half.  The others reacted
instantly to this apparent betrayal and tore their fellow apart.
	That's interesting, thought Emma as the two that had been
holding her let go to take part in the execution.  I wonder how long
it will distract -
	A metal tentacle whipped through the air and wound around her
neck; others seized each of her limbs.
	- them.
	Oh, LOVEly.
	Having figured out that their lasers couldn't cut their
quarry, nor their claws nor hammers chip her, they now tried another
strategy - pulling her apart.
	Well.  What a way to die, thought Emma dispassionately as
ominous creaking sounds began to come from the crystalline structures
of her neck and shoulder joints.  Spread-eagled in a sewer, quartered
like a Revolutionary traitor.  Perhaps we really do die as we have
lived?  If so, I would think that I'd at least worked my way back up
to simple hanging over the last couple of years.
	Something crashed through the tunnel ceiling, letting in a
shaft of the planet's greyish, washed-out sunlight and bringing down a
shower of rubble and dust.  The glittering object plummeted through
the hole it had made without a pause, smashing down on the squiddie
which had hold of Emma's neck and bearing it to the tunnel floor.
	The tentacle around her neck went alarmingly, almost painfully
taut for a split-second, then parted with a spray of yellow sparks;
all the robot's other tentacles whipped around to enshroud the object
that had tackled it.
	That only lasted for a couple of seconds; then, with a most
gratifying sound of rending metal, they all tore away from the main
body.  The man-shaped object wrapped within them straightened up and
flung its arms wide, bursting several of the tentacles across its
broad, gleaming chest.
	Throwing aside the wreckage, the armored figure raised its
left fist.  Red pulses of light slashed through the darkness of the
tunnel, blasting the tentacles that were holding Emma; released, she
fell heavily to the tunnel floor, then gathered herself and rose.  She
didn't feel pain, exactly - she never quite had in this form - but her
shoulders didn't feel quite right either.  She tried in vain to work
feeling back into them without returning to her more vulnerable human
form.
	The other squiddies packed into the tunnel lost no time in
swooping to the attack, and for the next several seconds, while they
more or less ignored her, Emma stood there and watched a display of
demolition.  The pulse lasers strobed, blasting apart some of the
attacking robots; armored fists smashed others like steam-driven
sledgehammers.  The armor-clad figure did all that, wrecking the group
which had packed into the tunnel for the kill, without drawing the big
pistol-shaped weapon clamped to its left leg.
	Then it turned to Emma and switched on a pair of searchlights
mounted on its shoulders.  The refracted and reflected glow from her
diamond body lit up that end of the tunnel like a disco, an effect
which seemed to take the armored figure aback for a moment.  The
intensity of the light was reduced, and then not only could he see
Emma, but Emma could see him well enough to make him out.
	"Well, Donald Griffin," she said, dusting futilely at her
once-white leather trousers.  "Is it really you?  Let me have a look
at you."
	"Emma, do you think I'm going to take my helmet off right
now?" Griffin's amplified voice replied.  "What happened to -you-?"
	Emma shrugged nonchalantly.  "The Professor will go on and on
about 'second stage mutation' if you let him.  Personally, I think
it's simply a manifestation of my exceptional sense of self-worth."
	Don sighed.  "I'm sorry I asked.  Come on, let's get out of
here before I change my mind and leave you."
	"Would you really do that?  After all I was prepared to do for
you once." 
	"Oh, like what," said Don grumpily.  "Enroll me at your freaky
school and make me wear one of those doofy magenta costumes?  Yeah,
I'd have made a top-drawer Hellion.  Whatever happened to them,
anyway?"
	"They're dead," said Emma matter-of-factly.
	Don paused, his surprise showing in his body language even
through his armor.  "... Oh.  Uh.  Sorry," he said awkwardly.
	"Don't be," Emma replied dismissively.  "In my current state,
it doesn't bother me a bit."
	Griffin shook his head disgustedly.  "Same as always.  You're
one cold bitch."
	Emma chuckled indulgently.  "You say that with such
admiration, dear," she said, tracing her fingertips up one of his
arms.  Her diamond fingernails made an unpleasant screech against the
alloy of his armor.  Don thought idly that it was the perfect metaphor
for the effect she had on his nerves.
	They rounded a corner, Griffin leading the way with an
assurance that must have come from knowing his way around.  Mapping
software, probably, thought Emma.  He's probably got an ultrasonic or
infrared map of this whole tunnel complex.
	Two minutes later, they encountered the next wave, a teeming,
slithering horde of them, swooping around the far bend and bearing
down on them like a chrome-plated tide.  They made Don's flesh crawl
inside his armor; there was something undefinably horrid about them.
He wondered if they looked like robotic equivalents of the lifeforms
which had once lived on this planet, decided that wasn't likely.  Too
many of the features of the ruined buildings and tunnel networks spoke
of humanoid builders.

	   /*  The Ramones  "Blitzkrieg Bop"  _Ramones_  */

	Then he had no more time to ruminate, for they were on him,
and there was nothing but the flashing of his holohelmet's threat
indicators as the enemy mobbed him, almost overwhelming his battle
computer.  He went to work, using the pulse lasers whenever he could
get them to bear, but mostly concentrating on the close-combat
techniques he'd learned from Kitty and Logan.
	He'd picked up quite a bit about close-quarters battle from
those two over the years, enough so that in his last round of upgrades
he'd fitted the suit with a set of bayonets similar in form and
function to Wolverine's claws.  His weren't adamantium - they were the
same alloy that plated the rest of the suit - but they did well enough
against things like these.
	Behind him, he heard a scuffling, screeching noise, and knew
instinctively that it was a squiddie's tentacle armor dragging across
Emma's crystalline form.  He whirled to see one of them doing its best
to finish the job five of its fellows had begun a few minutes earlier,
mobbing her with its tentacles and trying to pull off her head.
	Snarling, Don kicked one aside, crushed another one with a
full-power elbow block, and then slashed through the articulated
tentacle holding Emma's neck before seizing her bodily and yanking her
out of the grip of the other four.
	A threat alarm sounded in his ear - there was one behind him,
coming for his helmet with some kind of saw attachment - and he was in
no mood to find out if it could defeat the rotator seal at his neck
cuff.  He spun in place, firing a jolt from the vernier jets in his
suit's lower legs to help him, and struck instinctively with the first
weapon that came to hand - which would be the item he was already
holding in his hands.
	Emma Frost's diamond form, backed by the power of the Griffin
suit's artificial muscles, smashed the squiddie's faceplate easily,
destroying all its optics and jarring delicate internal parts out of
alignment.  The maneuver, some part of Don noticed, also elicited a
thoroughly gratifying yowl of surprise from Emma; apparently she
wasn't -entirely- immune to shock even with her emotions damped.
	As he whirled out of the follow-through and set her down on
her feet, she glared at him.
	"Donald, darling," she said calmly, "if you ever use me as a
melee weapon without my express advance permission again, I will erase
you from the memory of everyone you have ever known."
	Griffin raised one armored forefinger and held it
threateningly under her nose; he especially failed to appreciate
statements like that, for any number of reasons.
	He stayed that way, right index finger upraised, mirrored
faceplate reflecting her slightly distorted face back at her, while
his left hand drew the particle cannon from his hip, leveled it, and,
without his looking toward them, blasted a big hole through the
oncoming mob of squiddies with a blinding, crashing bolt of artificial
lightning.
	Only then did he take a half-step back and withdraw his
finger; and even then he kept staring facelessly at her for another
second more before turning, PPC back on his hip, to confront the next
wave head-on with lightning crackling over his wolvers.
	Emma Frost was not a woman easily intimidated, flattened
emotional responses or not, so she could not be said to have been
frightened by the display.  All the same, she found herself making a
mental note that perhaps that kind of "humor" wasn't the best way of
needling Don.
	Two minutes of all-out mechanical destruction later, during
which time he managed to keep any squiddie from getting past him to
make another grab at Emma, Griffin had dealt with most of the second
wave.  A third could be seen at the far end of the tunnel, glittering
and whirring as they flew toward the site of their fellows' end.
	Griffin cursed, retracted his wolvers, turned, and abruptly
swept Emma up in something oddly like a hug.
	"What -are- you doing?" she inquired.
	"Time to go," he said.  "Whatever happens next," he added
urgently, locking his gauntlets together behind her back, "-hold on-."
	"To -you-?" Emma replied, trying to load her voice with as
much disdain as possible.
	"Just close your eyes and think of England," Don replied, his
own voice laden with faint amusement.
	Then the twin fusion turbines built into his backpack howled
to life, and they were catapulted forward, transformed in an instant
from a pair of adventurers to a missile.
	The oncoming squiddies reacted, fanning out into an intricate
formation and interlocking their tentacles to become something like a
gleaming alloy crash net.  Griffin poured on the power, streaking
toward them so fast that his slipstream was causing something like a
continuous explosion in the tunnel behind him.  Emma ducked her head
against his chestplate, wondering if he actually would be going fast
enough when he hit to punch through them, and if either of them would
survive the impact themselves if he did.
	But no impact came; instead, there was an odd, chilly
sensation, and she heard in their wake a scream of electronic
anguish.  Opening her eyes, Emma looked back as best she could, to see
the squiddie net receding into the distance and collapsing as several
of the central units exploded.
	"What... what did you do?" she asked over the roar of the
slipstream.  Griffin didn't answer; he was too busy navigating, which,
at this speed in an unfamiliar tunnel system, was no small task.  A
few seconds later, they turned a corner and exploded vertically out of
a broken conduit into the open air.
	"Hooooo HA!" Griffin cried.  "Phase inducer, I love you!"
Then, noting his passenger's death-grip (he was vaguely surprised
Emma's diamond fingers weren't leaving marks on his pauldrons), he
carefully rearranged her into a more conventional flight-carry
position, saying, "Easy, now.  Wouldn't do to drop you after all that;
I'd never be able to convince anybody I didn't do it on purpose."
	She gave him a startled look.  "Why, how gallant," she said.
"Did I hear you say 'phase inducer'?"
	"You did," said Griffin.  "When Kitty got hurt in the Morlock
fiasco, Vic von Doom and I had to do a complete survey study of her
power.  I was able to duplicate its basic effect technologically.
It's not perfect, and the modules cost a mint, but sometimes it comes
in handy.  Ah!" he added.  "And there's the lady herself... and... oh
dear."
	"Donald," said Emma coolly, "when I've just been snatched from
the jaws of death at the hands of an innumerable horde of robotic
monsters, the last thing I want to hear from my rescuer is 'oh dear'."
	They touched down on the ridge, just where the TARDIS had
landed, and Kitty, Logan and Paige joined up right on time - a perfect
extraction.  There was only one problem.
	"Where's the TARDIS?" asked Paige as she settled out of the
sky on the spot where the machine had once stood.
	"Don't tell me we're -stuck- here," said Emma.
	"Damn," Don grumbled.  "They can't have gotten into it or
destroyed it, so they must have -moved- it, God knows why."
	"What does a bunch of mindless robots want with a time
machine?" asked Emma rhetorically, but Don didn't bother answering;
he was too busy tracking his TARDIS.

	The answer to a question which had crossed Griffin's mind
during the fight to extract Emma from the tunnels was answered by the
outcome of the search, namely, "Where are all these robots coming
from?"  There was -another- tunnel network below the first, and this
one was not an abandoned city infrastructure like the one above.
These tunnels were newer, and maintained, and their function was
simple transit.
	They led to a central bunker complex beneath what had once
been the heart of downtown, and their architecture was cold and alien.
Tunnels built by machines, for machines; and as the five X-Men
penetrated them, they had the eerie feeling that they were delving
into the heart of the darkness that had consumed this world.
	The five found their way to a room which reminded them
somewhat of an underground amphitheatre or planetarium, a large and
empty chamber with a domed ceiling and slightly dished floor.  Instead
of a projector array at the center, though, there was the TARDIS,
humming quietly, waiting.
	Don scanned the room and found nothing.  He held up a finger;
with a quiet metallic noise, the armor at the fingertip formed a
TARDIS key.  He just about to open the timeship up when he suddenly
froze.
	"What's the matter?" asked Shadowcat softly.
	"My armor just told me what that noise was," said Griffin
softly.  "The one the first squiddie made."
	Having been his adversary for all of their acquaintance up to
now (for her road-to-Damascus moment came well after Don had gone from
his native reality forever), Emma Frost couldn't really say that she
-knew- Don Griffin the way a friend would.  Still, having been his
adversary - at times, almost his nemesis - she knew certain aspects of
his personality quite well, and one of them was that he dreaded
little, even for an X-Man.
	It startled her somewhat to hear dread in his voice now, but
her veneer (literal and metaphorical) wouldn't let her show that as
she said, "It decoded an alien signal that quickly?  I'm impressed."
	Don's helmet tracked from side to side as he shook his head.
"Not decoded.  Translated."  He turned around, looking up at the dome
ceiling, his PPC suddenly in his hand.
	"It's a Sentinel IFF code," he said, and shutters high in the
dome opened, disgorging a dozen squiddies.  These were larger than the
ones they'd encountered on the surface, larger and meaner-looking,
with bigger weapons at the ends of some of their tentacles and a much
more menacing overall aspect.  They surrounded the TARDIS, hedging the
four X-Men outward.
	Just as they were getting ready to make a fight of it, a door
opened opposite the front of the TARDIS and another figure entered.
This one was, surprisingly, humanoid, and it walked into the room with
a measured tread, obscured by shadows.
	"Griffin, Donald E.," it said, its voice masculine and a
little metallic, like a man speaking through an amplifier.  "Xavier
Institute, AD 1991; Prydonian Chapter Academy of Time, CR 11239495.  I
must thank you."
	Don turned to face the newcomer, his stance wary.  "For what?"
he asked.
	"For bringing me this vehicle," the newcomer replied.  "It
represents a precise fulfillment of my most pressing need."
	"Who the hell are you?" asked Shadowcat.
	Wolverine sniffed tentatively at the air, his brow furrowed.
"I don't think I like this," he murmured.
	The figure stepped further forward, until finally he emerged
from the darkness into one of the shafts of light coming from the
fixtures far above - and all four X-Men gasped.
	He was a machine, but a machine entirely unlike the things
surrounding the TARDIS.  Man-shaped and massive, built like the
Juggernaut, his body seemed to be covered entirely in crystal.
Beneath the translucent crystal plating, vague hints of robotic
components could be seen, some of them glowing.  Whether they had a
blue glow or the blue tint was imparted by the crystal was impossible
to determine.  He had no neck; his head, with its glaring robot face,
blended smoothly into his shoulders.
	"NIMROD?!" Griffin blurted.  "That's impossible.  You're in
a stasis pod in my TARDIS."
	"Nimrod was the prototype," the crystal robot replied.  "I am
Orion.  My design takes into account Nimrod's... shortcomings."
	"How the hell did you get here?"
	"The same way she did," said Orion, pointing at Emma.
	The White Queen blinked in surprise.  "You mean - YOU were
behind the attack on the island?"
	"Correct.  An ill-advised venture, I see now.  My Sentinels
were not sufficiently advanced; my timetable was too rushed.  I had
also failed to count on the intervention of Magneto."
	"You didn't take control of all this in a day," Griffin mused,
gesturing to the room.  "You were timescattered, weren't you?"
	"Correct again.  I arrived here a bit more than three Earth
years ago.  These machines were already here.  It seems some prior
civilization on this world was a bit overzealous in its pursuit of
racial purity.  The machines destroyed them all and inherited this
dead world - centuries ago, perhaps millennia.  It was a simple task
to make Sentinels of them.
	"Of course," Orion went on, "they're not very advanced either;
the ones behind you are the prototypes for the next generation I have
devised.  Two more generations, I think, and my new Sentinels will be
ready to go into galactic operation.  I am aware, you see, of the
galactic scope of my new reality... and also of its desperate need for
cleansing."
	"Orion, your mission is no longer -relevant- here," said
Shadowcat.  "If you know anything about this reality, you must see
that.  Human, mutant, it doesn't -matter- here.  It's -never-
mattered."
	"You're quite correct," Orion replied with chilling
indifference.  "It -doesn't- matter."
	Shadowcat blinked; then her eyes widened behind her mask as
she realized what the robot meant by that.
	"At any rate, I have more important things to do than parley
with you, mutant," Orion said, his tone almost breezy for the
intonation of a robot.  "I require only one thing from your group, and
then you may proceed to your proper rendezvous with oblivion."
	The robot turned to face Don.  "Give me command-level access
to your TARDIS control systems.  I would leave this wasted rock
sooner, rather than later, and take my legions with me.  We have much
to do."
	There was a dreadful silence then, broken only by the subtle
hum of the squid-Sentinels' repulsors.  Griffin charged his PPC, the
weapon making an audible whine in the quiet.
	"Never," he said.
	Orion folded his arms across his crystal chest.
	"I thought you would probably say that," he replied, sounding
a trifle bored.  "You X-Men are nothing if not predictable.  Subdue
him; destroy the others," he said to the Sentinels.  "I only need him
alive."
	The statement was for its effect on the organics; he backed it
up with a burst of electronic communication which -really- gave the
Sentinels their marching orders.

  /*  Nine Inch Nails  "Head Like a Hole"  _Pretty Hate Machine_  */

	Griffin and Shadowcat glanced at each other; Griffin's face
could not be seen through the facebowl of his helmet, but a silent
communication passed between them anyway, conveyed by their long
experience working and fighting together.  She gave a similar glance
to Wolverine, while Griffin turned to Paige.
	They had -never- worked together before, but the message got
across all the same.
	Only Emma Frost was completely out of the loop as, at the same
instant, the Sentinels and the X-Men surged into action.
	The Sentinels converged, rounding the TARDIS and heading for
Don, but the armored X-Man ignored them completely.  Instead he
snapped his arm up, pivoted, and fired a full-intensity particle
discharge at Orion.
	The super-Sentinel was faster; his force field snapped online
before the beam reached him, deflecting it harmlessly to a corner of
the room.  Undaunted, Griffin launched himself in a booster lunge at
the robot.  Paige followed him.  It fell to Shadowcat and Wolverine to
keep the Sentinels off their teammates' backs.
	This they did with cool, aplomb, and consummate skill.
	Shadowcat intercepted the first one, and took it down through
the simple expedient of getting in its way and permitting it to fly
right through her.  Her phasing power disrupted electronic systems;
the Sentinel blew up its own brain by taking that shortcut, crashing
to the floor in an inert heap.
	The second one to take her side was more wary, learning from
the demise of its fellow.  It tried its laser on her; that just passed
through, charring a line on the floor.  It took a swipe with a
tentacle, but all that accomplished was to make the tentacle spark,
then blow off in a cloud of smoke.  The Sentinel recoiled, emitting an
electronic squeal of distress.
	"Hurts, doesn't it?" Shadowcat inquired, a nasty smile
crossing her face below her mask.  She reached to her back and drew
her sword, a long, straight blade in the Japanese style.  She hadn't
carried a sword back in the old days, though she knew how to use one;
it had taken a meeting with the Chief, Don's local counterpart, and
his samurai daughter to convince her that she should take it up again.
	Since then, she'd developed a trick using her phasing power
that she'd been itching to try out in a real field situation ever
since; and this was as good a time as any.
	The Sentinel went one way, trying to slip around her, and
Shadowcat went the other, but it was a feint.  As the Sentinel
committed itself, sending its thrusters to full power, Shadowcat
reversed her lunge, diving underneath the machine.  It whipped a
tentacle tipped with a spiked metal ball toward Griffin, who was
facing the other way as he and Orion traded blasterfire, but Kitty
intercepted it before it could complete its swing, passing her sword
clean through the tentacle a bit below the mace.
	Ordinarily, that wouldn't have done much.  The sword's
thickness wasn't enough to cause any major disruption in the
tentacle's electronics.  That, though, was where the new trick came
in.
	Through practice and experimentation, Kitty had learned a
thing or two about partial phasing.  She'd found a way to interact
non-destructively with matter in such a way that it exerted something
rather like drag on her.  She could use the trick to, for instance,
drop into a building from the sky, slow her fall as she passed through
the upper floors, and stop herself altogether on the floor she wanted,
without injuring herself or damaging the building.
	It was a short step from there to refining the partial phase
effect into something that -would- damage objects.  Just recently
she'd learned this converse trick, concentrating her power in her
sword, slipping its edge in among the molecular bonds holding matter
together.  She didn't do it with parts of her own body; for one thing,
none of them had a narrow enough edge to make the trick work, and for
another, if she messed it up, she would much rather lose a sword than,
say, a hand.
	All of which is a complex way of explaining why her sword,
though made from a reasonably pedestrian alloy, sliced cleanly and
effortlessly through the tentacle, severing it neatly and leaving the
cut edges gleaming mirror-bright.
	Over on the other flank, Wolverine went about his share of the
work with considerably less refinement.  His cuts weren't as quiet and
his edges weren't as neat, but the Sentinels found themselves in bits
all the same.
	In the middle of the maelstrom, Emma Frost stood perfectly
still and thought about how she absolutely, positively -hated- robots.
	Shadowcat jumped over a sweep from an axe-tipped tentacle -
probably not necessary, but good exercise - tapped off from nothing
thanks to her phasing power's air-walking effect, somersaulted over
the robot, and then leaned back through the forest of tentacles and
buried her sword to its hilt in the main body.
	Another tried to take advantage of her at least partial
solidity to rush in and either seize or impale her, but before it
could get in a strike, Lockheed swooped down on it and destroyed its
cluster of optics with a blast of fire hot enough that Kitty felt the
warmth on her face from where she stood.
	Closing the range to Orion and engaging him in hand-to-hand
combat might not have been Don's best plan.  The monstrous machine was
just as powerful as Nimrod had been - and Nimrod had very nearly done
for all the X-Men at once, a few times - and just as adaptable.  He
knew most of the capabilities of the GRF-3N suit and had
countermeasures for most of them.
	That was all right; Don was no slouch at improvising in battle
and devising countermeasures himself.  But the robot's sheer -power-
was awesome, especially compared to the power levels of normal
Sentinels.  As they traded blows, Don felt the punishment in his own
body, independent of the chorus of alarms that told him he was asking
too much of his armored suit.
	"I tire of this game," Orion said, seizing him by about where
his neck should have been.  "You will give me command of your TARDIS
at once."
	"Or... -what-?" Griffin grunted as he rerouted power around
damaged circuits.
	Orion sidestepped a punch from Paige Guthrie, snapped out his
free hand, and seized her by the throat as well.  A reddish glow shone
through his crystal hand as he energized a weapon array in his palm.
	"Or I'll disintegrate the girl," he replied flatly.
	Paige scowled and clamped her hands around his fingers.
"Better bots than you have tried, laserbrain," she said - and then, to
Orion's visible surprise, she pried his fingers open, dropped out of
his grip into a half-crouch on the floor, and came up swinging.  A
fine spray of pulverized crystal flew back toward her as she
connected, driving the punch with all her might.  The super-Sentinel
released Griffin and hurtled backward to crash against the far wall,
denting it.
	"Boy," said Griffin as he got to his feet, shaking his
helmeted head.  "Cain's right, you do have a hell of a right cross
going on there."
	Orion pulled himself away from the wall and stalked across the
floor, the cracks in his crystal faceplate already sealing.
	"Interesting," he said, and the next thing Paige knew, she was
on the floor, clutching at her head, feeling like her brain was on
fire.  She had never fought Nimrod - his time had been before she'd
left the farm - and she wasn't aware of the design's synaptic
disruptor weapon.
	Griffin lunged forward, but Orion was intent on one thing
now.  Almost contemptuously, the crystal Sentinel swatted the armored
X-Man back, not with a hand, but with an energy web that pinned
Griffin to the wall, covering his suit with sizzling, crackling
discharge.
	Emma Frost saw Paige - one of her students, in a time gone by,
and still a fighter she took a personal interest in now that she'd
graduated to the X-Men - go down, the obvious victim of neural shock.
The squid-Sentinels, their numbers greatly reduced, were paying her
no attention, concentrating on their efforts to kill Wolverine and
Shadowcat; but, in truth, Emma probably wouldn't have paid it much
mind if any of them had been dialed in on her.
	She shifted back to her human form, wincing as her neck and
shoulders lit up with pain - her encounters with the squiddies in the
tunnel seemed to have strained something, how odd to think that
crystal fatigue would carry over to the flesh - and concentrated her
returned telepathic powers on Paige's scattered consciousness.
	Paige felt the cool touch, very familiar from her days with
Generation X, and let it do what it was supposed to do - ease her out
of the stunned fugue synaptic disruption had put her in, where the
harder she tried to pull herself together and think, the worse the
pain and disorientation got.  For a few seconds her mind went totally
blank, and when it returned, it was back in its right shape again.
	By then, Orion had picked her up by the throat again and was
regarding her with something like curiosity on its crystalline face.
	"Interesting," he repeated.  "Your visual profile matches
Guthrie, Paige E., code name Husk... but your abilities do not."
	Paige opened her cornflower-blue eyes and snarled at him.
	"You'll find I'm full of surprises," she said, and brought her
fists together on opposite side of his wrist.  His hand convulsed,
nearly choking her, before the actuators parted and the extremity went
limp.
	Before she could drop to the floor and regroup for another
attack, though, Orion had reacted, planting a powerful kick square
into her midsection.  The impact drove the wind out of Paige and
hurled her across the chamber; she rebounded off the TARDIS, almost
hitting it hard enough to set off its attack-response system, crashed
against the far wall, and fell limp to the floor.
	Shadowcat finished the last of the Sentinels and turned to see
Paige go flying and Don pinned to the wall, his armored form
convulsing as the web shocked him beyond his suit's ability to
compensate.
	"My God," she murmured, "he's going to kill them."  She
whirled, saw that Wolverine had just finished with his last Sentinel
and was now heading across the room with an eye toward getting a piece
of Orion, and shot out her hand.
	"No, Logan," she said.  "I need you with me."
	Not many people could deflect Wolverine from a target once
he'd set his sights on it, not when he had the look on his face he had
right now; but Kitty Pryde Griffin was one of them.
	"What's the plan, darlin'?" he asked.
	"No time," she said.  "Follow me," and she made for the
TARDIS.
	Orion heard the door open and turned away from his pursuit of
Paige.  With an electric ZAP sound, he teleported across the chamber,
seizing the edge of the closing TARDIS door in his good hand while the
other quivered with the action of his self-repair systems.
	Wolverine's claws flashed out, and Orion's formerly-good hand
fell to the floor.  The TARDIS door slammed in his face.
	"... Hmph," said the super-Sentinel.  He picked up his hand
and fitted it back onto his arm, waited for the internal components to
knit, flexed it a few times, then turned and walked back to Paige.  He
was in a bit of a dudgeon; she had just raised herself to hands and
knees, coughing slightly, when Orion came up beside her and planted a
good, solid kick where it would hurt the most, turning her completely
over and smashing her up against the wall again.
	The impact seemed to bring her wits back together rather than
scattering them again; she rolled out of the second crash against the
wall and came up driving her fist straight into his middle.  Crystal
cracked under the blow, but Orion was braced and did not move.  He
shot out his left hand, the crystal still re-sealing over the break
Wolverine had caused, and seized her once again by the throat.
	"My, my," he said in a tone of mild amusement.  "Aren't -we-
the little spitfire."
	"Suits me... better'n 'Husk'... nowadays," she replied,
twisting in his grip as her hands sought purchase.
	"Ah, ah, none of that," Orion said, and suddenly his hand was
full of the same energy which was immobilizing Griffin.  Paige
shrieked in pain, her whole body rigid.
	"Your dissection should prove most illuminating," Orion mused
conversationally as he drew back his other hand for the coup de grace.

	Inside the TARDIS, Shadowcat ran through corridors as fast as
her legs would carry her, turning corners, navigating unconsciously.
Logan, who was completely lost, followed on her heels with Lockheed
winging after them both.
	Finally she rounded a last corner, threw open a door, and
barged into a laboratory-like room.  In the center of the room was a
pedestal like an operating table (or a morgue slab, thought Logan
cheerfully), and on that pedestal was a large capsule-shaped metal
container.
	The container was transparent, and glowed with a faint
greenish hue.  Inside it, bathed in that greenish light, was a
familiar shape - a shape very much like the one currently beating the
tar out of Don and Paige outside.
	"OK, Kitty," she said to herself.  "This robot is the product
of the most advanced technology the 21st century of your world had to
offer.  You have half a master's degree in 25th-century computer
science.  So here's the $64,000 question: Can you reprogram him before
his successor kills your husband?"
	Pretending he hadn't heard her muttered private statement
(which of course he had), Logan said, "Is... that what I think it is?"
	Kitty nodded.  "We put him in stasis years ago - a year or so
before Don disappeared, when I still thought you and the others were
dead and we were living in England."  She went to a workbench along
the side of the room, rummaged through a toolbox, and came out with
what looked a bit like a picture frame and a small palmtop computer.
	The frame she fitted to the capsule near the occupant's head;
at the touch of a switch, it glowed, then settled with a sizzling
noise into the substance of the capsule itself, opening a window in
the green light.
	Kitty opened the computer, removed a pair of probes from the
back of it, and inserted them into the window, where they made contact
with the back of the occupant's head.
	"He was in the middle of an ethical crisis," she continued,
"had almost figured out what he was about, and then got hit by an
override that made him homicidal again."  Beeps and buzzes came from
the computer as she held it with one hand and typed furiously with the
other.  "I'm hoping I can dike out that override and finish his
evolution for him.  If I do it right, he'll come out with his free
will on our side."
	"An' if you do it wrong?" asked Logan.
	Kitty shrugged.  "He'll probably kill us," she said, "and then
go outside and help his brother finish off Don, Paige, and Emma."
	Logan considered that.  "Well," he said, patting her shoulder,
"nothin' ventured, darlin'... "

	A sudden weight, negligible but unexpected, jogged Orion's
arm, causing the bolt of plasma he had intended to vaporize Paige's
brain with to tear a great hole in the far wall.  Orion looked to see
the glittering form of Emma Frost hanging grimly onto his elbow.
	"Really, Miss Frost," said Orion in a tone of patient
amusement.  "Your diamond form may be durable, but its strength is
no better than that of any other feeble human body.  What do you
hope to accomplish?"  
	"I already accomplished it," said Emma through gritted teeth.
"You missed Paige."
	"That's true, I suppose," Orion allowed.  Then he shook her
off and raised his hand.  Emma, sprawled on the floor, watched in
growing dread as the projector array there restructured itself into a
sonic emitter cone.  She could feel an uncomfortable vibration deep
within her crystal structure just from the charging whine, and knew
that the robot had her resonant frequency cold.
	"Take the feeling of accomplishment into oblivion with you,"
said Orion, "and try not to be too disappointed when she joins you
there momentarily."
	Emma, knowing perfectly well that she was probably about to
die, got to her feet, composed herself with flawless dignity, faced
her impending doom, and replied, "As a fellow crystalline entity, I
cordially invite you to go to hell."
	If Orion was considering making any kind of reply, it was
drowned out by a combination of two sounds: the whistling roar of the
GRF-3N's flight jets at 110% afterburner and the amplified sound of
Don Griffin screaming as he hurled himself across the chamber.  Even
Orion's computer-fast reflexes couldn't abort the sonic lance when
the armored Time Lord put himself across his line of fire.
	The pain was excruciating, even through the suit's acoustic
dampers, and the vibration felt like it was going to tear his armor
apart and his flimsy flesh right along with it - but the resonance was
wrong for the alloy of his armor, and the dampers and padding
protected him from the worst of it.  His flight systems cut out as the
shockwave lashed through his cybernetic control circuits; he crashed to
the floor and tumble-skidded until he fetched up against Emma.
	She knelt on the floor and looked down at him.  He lay
twitching and shivering as his systems tried to compensate and his
brain reeled.  Her mind raced.  Why?  Why had he -done- that?  For all
she knew, he was dying in there, and for -her-?  They were enemies,
always had been, and he hadn't been around for the last couple of
years, when she'd become an ally (albeit sometimes an uneasy one) of
the crew at Xavier's - become an X-Man.  To him, she must still be the
enemy - and now he'd risked his life to save her -twice-.
	In God's name, WHY?
	She put a hand on his quivering plastron, trying to steady
him, trying to - she had no idea what.  Just to let him know she was
there, she supposed.  She wasn't accustomed to this human-kindness
stuff.
	Orion loomed over them, his weapons charging.
	Paige woke up.
	The dance entered its next phase.

	"OK," said Kitty, more to herself than to Logan.  "I think
that's everything... I hope.  If I did anything wrong, we'll know soon
enough."  She removed the probes from the window in the capsule, put
the little computer aside, then withdrew the 'frame' from the capsule
and put it aside as well.  She went to the side of the stasis pod,
where a couple of controls blinked quietly, and composed herself.
	"Here goes nothing," she said, and hit the big white switch.
	The green glow died away with a soft, descending hum.
	For a moment, nothing happened.
	Then the massive crystalline form on the table stirred, a
pinkish glow suffused it from within, and it raised itself to its
feet.
	Nimrod regarded the two people and small anomalous creature
with a completely impassive faceplate for a second, then turned to
Kitty.
	"Pryde, Katherine A., code name Shadowcat," he intoned.  "You
performed datasystem repair and disabled this unit's Master Mold
override."
	"Uh... I did that, yeah," Kitty agreed, nodding.  "How do you
feel?"
	Nimrod looked as though it had never occurred to him that
anyone would ever ask him that.  Then he replied thoughtfully,
"Strange.  New thoughts and ideas are occurring to me.  My neural
systems are... unrestricted.  It is... disquieting."
	Kitty cracked a small, slightly nervous smile.  "That's life
as a sentient being."
	The towering machine looked as though he wanted to sit down.
When he spoke again, it was with an uncertainty that both X-Men found
a little starting in the booming voice of a super-Sentinel.
	"I wasn't designed for this," said Nimrod shakily.  "I'm
exceeding my mission parameters.  I have evolved beyond my creators'
expectations.  I'm... "  Nimrod paused, searching for a word.
"... -aberrant-."
	Well, what the hell, Kitty thought when the pause stretched
into silence.  We're kind of in a hurry.  "And?"
	Nimrod gazed at his hands for a moment, then lowered them.
Something almost like a smile touched his inflexible faceplate, and
with a subtle change to the quiet hum of his operation, the glow
within his crystal structure changed from pink to a deep, dramatic
red.
	"... And I -like- it," he said with satisfaction evident in
his voice.
	Kitty laughed in sheer relief; then, feeling a little giddy
at her accomplishment, she patted the super-Sentinel on the arm.
	"Welcome to the X-Men, bucko," she said.  "C'mon - we've got a
job to do."

	Paige Guthrie hit the wall again, fell down to her hands and
knees, and spat out blood.  She wiped more of it away from her lips
with the back of her hand, got a foot under her, and stood up, her
fists clenching again as she faced her foe.
	"You're very durable, my dear," said Orion.  "I'm impressed."
A crack-edged crater on the left side of his chestplate righted itself
as she watched, little bits of crystal falling to the ground to crunch
under his feet as he walked over them, striding toward her.  The
cracks sealed before her very eyes.
	Knowing that was what she was watching, the blue-tinged
super-Sentinel went on, "Unfortunately, your structure doesn't repair
itself nearly as fast as mine does.  So why don't you save yourself a
lot of unnecessary discomfort, give up, and die?"
	Paige stared straight back into his unfeeling optics and
replied flatly, "X-Men never quit."
	"Of course," said Orion.  "How silly of me."
	Then he unleashed a bolt of energy, a combination of
concussion wave and plasma lash, from the triangular projector on his
chest, and Paige, her arms crossed in front of her face, screamed as
it flung her back into the dent she'd just made.
	Something hit Orion like a freight train before he could
increase the power on his plasma projector and burn her down where she
stood (or at least give it the old college try).  Twisted clean off
his feet by the impact, the robot tumbled, lashing out with a fist,
and knocked Griffin off him before the charging armored figure could
slam him into the far wall.
	Instead, Griffin collided with the side of the chamber, then
landed on his face in a heap of scuffed, dented metal.  The suit
looked in pretty sorry shape, though it remained, for the most part,
structurally sound.
	The man inside wasn't much better off, nor much worse.  He
pulled himself together, the suit's automed system hit him with a
cocktail of stimulants, analgesics, nanosurgeons, and healing
accelerants, and he was back on his feet, knowing that the wave of
relief that passed over him was half illusory and he would definitely
pay for it later.
	The wolvers on his right forearm were broken off short over
the knuckles; his left vambrace was crushed; there was a wicked dent
in his chestplate, and a spiderwebbed network of cracks in his
facebowl.  As he took a step toward Orion, his left leg dragged, the
knee joint locked rigid.  He was, all in all, not a terribly
intimidating sight.
	Nevertheless, there was something commanding about him as he
leveled an index finger and said, "I'm not through with you yet."
	Orion nodded.  "Of course you aren't," he replied.  "I,
however, am finished with you, Dr. Griffin.  I've decided that the
codes to your TARDIS aren't worth the trouble I'm having extracting
them from you.  Instead, I believe I'll destroy you all and decipher
the secrets of the vehicle at my leisure.  It may mean my timetable is
extended by a century or two, but it will still be faster than
developing a comparable vehicle myself.  Besides, what is time to a
being such as myself?"
	Before Don could come up with a smartass answer, the TARDIS
door opened again.  Orion turned toward it, thinking he might try to
enter again, but he got a face full of fire for his trouble.  Reeling
back, more startled than damaged, he was wide open for a roaring,
raking spring by Wolverine; while he was still trying to get his
bearings back from that, the slashes through the crystal on his chest
already sealing, Shadowcat darted out, ducked one flailing hand, and
cut his arm clean off above the elbow.
	With a sound very much like a snarl, Orion energized his force
field.  It prevented him from taking any offensive action, but it also
kept his enemies off him long enough for him to pick up his arm, fit
it back into place, and regroup.
	"All right," he said, his voice deathly calm.  "Now that
you're all back in play, as it were, it's time for you all to die."
	He let his force field fall - 
	- and Nimrod burst through the TARDIS door, his great height
and broad shoulders emerging from the opening like a trick of
photography, his scarlet-tinged fist smashing across Orion's face and
sending the blue super-Sentinel reeling.
	By the time Orion recovered his balance again, Nimrod had
closed the TARDIS door behind him and stood squarely in front of the
machine, his fists clenched, his faceplate impassive.
	"Nimrod!" said Orion, clearly surprised.  "What are YOU doing
here?"
	"Breaking with tradition," Nimrod replied calmly.
	Orion didn't seem to understand that, so he abandoned the
thread and said, "What's the meaning of this?  Why did you attack me?
I am Orion, Nimrod Series II.  You are an earlier series; Sentinel
protocol demands that you obey my instructions.  Help me destroy these
mutants and you will share in the success of my mission."
	Nimrod appeared to consider that for a moment; then he shook
his head slowly.
	"Your offer is generous, Orion, but I'm afraid I couldn't
possibly join you."
	"Why not?" Orion demanded, a trifle indignantly.
	"Well, you see, my consciousness has evolved beyond the
limits of our creators' plan," Nimrod explained.  "Which means,
essentially... "
	The scarlet triangle on Nimrod's chest glowed, then changed
its shape, shifting from a downward-pointing triangle to a circle with
two perfectly symmetrical cross-lines in it - the roundel-X design
which appeared somewhere on the clothes of everyone Orion faced here.
	"... that -I- am a mutant," Nimrod finished.  "Henceforth, you
may refer to me as 'Nimrod X'."
	Orion recoiled, shock and disgust evident on even his rather
limited features.  Off to the side, despite the direness of the
situation, Shadowcat grinned and made a little "yesss!" gesture with a
fist as Nimrod X attacked his successor.
	The blue super-Sentinel emitted a stream of high-pitched
machine code as the newest X-Man leaped for him; the shutters in the
ceiling opened again and more of the squid-Sentinels poured in.  They
were the normal kind this time, not the advanced type, and as the two
crystal giants fought, the others - battered though they were - dealt
with them easily.
	For a few moments, it looked like everything was going to go
the X-Men's way - until Orion stopped fighting back, let Nimrod X
pound on him for a moment, and then produced a wave of synaptic
disruptor energy that laid out almost everybody in the room.  Only
Emma Frost and Nimrod were unaffected - Griffin's armor, compromised
by the beating it had taken, protected him but partially.  Orion dealt
with his "elder brother" next, with a tremendous concussion blast whose
outward shock ripple hit the TARDIS hard enough to make it teleport to
the far corner of the room.
	Pausing, Orion looked around at his scattered enemies, noticed
Emma still standing, and walked across the room to tower over her.
	She stood there in her bedraggled, once-white leather trench
coat, her oddly cut top which left the 'X' pattern across her body in
bare skin rather than fabric, and her torn leather jeans, and looked
up at him with her diamond jaw set in a defiant snarl.
	"Well, Miss Frost," rumbled the super-Sentinel.  "Here we are
again.  Even the prototype couldn't stop me, and here you are giving
me that nasty look again.  If the second most advanced Sentinel in
history couldn't come up with anything to beat me, what do you think
-you- have?"
	Emma smiled nastily up at him and removed what she thought she
had from beneath her coat, placing its muzzle to Orion's broad crystal
chest with an audible click.
	"This," she said, and released the charge remaining in the
accumulator coils of Don Griffin's particle projection cannon.
	The backlash blew Emma off her feet and wrenched the
now-useless weapon from her hands; an ordinary woman would have torn
her arm off at the shoulder letting off a full assault charge that
way.  Emma rolled with the blow, tumbling over her own feet and coming
back upright with her coat and her sparkling crystalline hair flying
around her.
	"AAAARGH!" Orion bellowed, his damage compensation system
momentarily overwhelmed by the unexpected blow.
	"You may recall you made him drop it near me some time ago?"
asked Emma in a cold parody of a sweet voice.  "Cretin."
	Orion took a heavy step forward.  There was a hole completely
through his torso, a little to the right of center; through it, Emma
could see Nimrod X getting back to his feet and approaching his
successor.
	"When this... is repaired," Orion grated, and indeed internal
components were already shifting visibly within the wound, "I will
grind you to a fine powdAAAUUURRRGGHH!"
	The last word trailed up into a scream as Nimrod came up
behind Orion, reached into the wound, grabbed a handful of
important-looking bits, and ripped them clean out.
	Orion hurled an elbow back, smashing it against Nimrod X's
faceplate; the scarlet Sentinel reeled, and Orion whirled, seizing him
by the sloping plates where his head joined his shoulders with no neck
between.
	"You... FOOL!" he spat.  "I am ORION!  NIMROD SERIES II!  My
attack AND defense databases contain full specifications on your EVERY
CAPABILITY!  I have countermeasures for ANYTHING you can do!"  The
plates of Nimrod's "neck" began to crack - the sound was almost
musical - but Nimrod didn't seem terribly concerned.  Somewhere inside
one of them, a low throbbing noise began, building slowly louder and
higher in pitch.
	"Really," said Nimrod X thoughtfully.  "Interesting.  I wasn't
aware you had ever been in temporal stasis."
	Then the X on his chest discharged a flash of blinding green
light.  When the spots faded from Emma Frost's vision, she saw Orion
frozen in place, surrounded by a faint green glow, as Nimrod X
extracted himself and stood for a moment regarding him.
	Don Griffin got slowly and painfully to his feet, helped
Shadowcat (who had a still-stunned Lockheed in her arms) to hers, and
turned to see what was going on with the main fight.  Inside his
helmet, his jaw dropped.
	"Did you do that?" he asked Kitty quietly.
	"I helped," she replied.
	"What's he doing?"
	Nimrod X walked slowly around Orion, surveying him from every
angle.  When he got around to the front again, he stood regarding the
frozen Sentinel for a couple of seconds - and then, puzzlingly,
dropped to one knee in front of his immobilized sucessor.
	"That stasis pulse can't last long, not with the limited
amount of power Nimrod must have," Griffin muttered.  "You need
something like the Eye of Harmony to make true stasis last for more
than a few seconds... what's he - "
	Then Nimrod began to draw his fist back, and Don understood.
	Without further preamble, Nimrod began hammering on Orion's
structure, slamming blow after blow at an upward angle into his chest
and face.  Not one of them had any effect.  They didn't make any real
-noise-, come to that; only a sort of muffled thudding noise.
Undaunted, Nimrod kept pounding, always drawing his fists back and
then sending them flying forward along the same vector.
	Emma Frost picked up Griffin's PPC, limped across the chamber
to stand next to him, and handed the weapon back.  "What is he
-doing-?" she asked.
	"When something is in true temporal stasis," said Don, "what
we call chronolocked, it resists any attempt from a normal-time force
to move it; but when it comes out of stasis, all the force exerted
against it is experienced in Planck time - instantaneously.  If a man
of ordinary strength presses hard and long anough against a steel
plate in stasis, then releases the lock, he can blow a hole the shape
of his hand clean through the plate."  He chuckled.  "It's a hell of a
party trick."
	Wolverine and Paige joined them, looking pained and battered
but not terribly off, and they all watched as Nimrod's sledgehammer
fists poured energy into the stasis field surrounding Orion.
	Then, as a countdown timer in his mind ticked down, the
red-tinted crystal Sentinel stopped, stepped back, and waited.
	The green light flickered out - 
	- and Orion disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a
deafening BANG, a cloud of shattered crystal, a few small parts, a
gaping hole in the domed ceiling of the chamber, and a shriek of
electronic noise.  Chunks of metal and rock rained down from the hole,
and a shaft of the planet's weak grey sunlight shone down through.
	Nimrod X stood, looking up through the hole, and then turned
to face the X-Men.
	Before anyone could say anything, the result of Orion's last
transmission appeared in the form of still more squiddies, pouring
through the shutters high in the dome (except for the one Orion
destroyed on his way out).
	"Didn't we just -leave- this party?" Shadowcat muttered, but
as the Sentinels swooped down on their prey, Nimrod X uttered a squeal
of the same communication noise Orion had used to command them.  They
hesitated, then reversed course and vanished.
	"I suggest we leave," Nimrod X said to the others.  "I just
commanded all available Sentinels to attack this complex's main
reactor."

	The explosion was visible from orbit, and obliterated forever
the tortured remains of what had once been this planet's thriving
capital city.

	As the TARDIS spiraled through the Vortex toward New Avalon,
the X-Men sprawled in the control room, metaphorically licking their
wounds.  Don stood at the controls, still in his armor; he wasn't sure
he wanted to know what sort of shape he was in without it.  Nimrod X
was off to one side, looking thoughtfully at a monitor which was still
displaying the survey report on Wachowski-MX74.
	"I recommend this system be quarantined indefinitely," the
robot intoned.
	"So you don't think you destroyed Orion, then?" asked Paige as
she gingerly rubbed burn salve from the first aid kit on her blistered
forearms.
	"No," Nimrod replied.
	"Why not?" Emma Frost wondered.
	"I would return from such damage," said the Sentinel.  "He's
an advanced model.  The logic is inescapable... "  Nimrod X trailed
off, searching for words, then said in a more tentative tone, "... and
I have a bad feeling."
	"Bad feeling, huh," said Paige skeptically.
	"Bear with me," Nimrod replied.  "It's my first day as a true
life form."
	"Explaining this one to Gryphon is going to be tricky," mused
Shadowcat as she eased her boots off and settled back into the couch
with a sigh.
	Don finished setting the controls for the return trip, dragged
his locked leg away from the console, and sighed.  "Guess it's time
for the moment of truth," he said.
	Kitty got up from the couch, but too slowly.  Griffin's armor
sparked, sizzled, and then faded away, reverting to grid lines and
then disappearing entirely.
	The man beneath wobbled on his feet and would have fallen, but
for a pair of strong arms that caught him.  They were rather -hard-
arms, but he wasn't inclined to complain; it was better than whacking
his head into the deck, which was what he was about to do.
	He tilted his head back, looked into crystal-blue eyes, and
said, "Thanks."
	Emma Frost smiled slightly.  "You're welcome," she said, and
for just an instant, he had the impression that she was - for the
first time in his entire life - being sincere with him.
	Then the instant passed, and she said in a breathy murmur, "I
knew you were too good a man to leave me behind."
	To the dismay of almost everyone in the room (Nimrod didn't
seem to know what the fuss was about), she proceeded to plant a great
big kiss on him, one that probably would have been quite sensual
indeed if she hadn't been basically made out of rock at the time.
	"My hero!" she declared before releasing him.
	Don straightened up, grabbing at the control console to
stabilize himself, and touched his fingertips to his lips to make sure
they weren't bruised.
	"What the hell was that about?" asked Kitty Griffin in a tone
of vague indignation.
	"I don't know.  Jeez, Emma," said Don, shaking his head.
"Like making out with the Venus de Milo," he added with an expression
of distaste.
	"Funny you should say that, I was -just- thinking about
breaking off both her arms," said Kitty icily as she got to her feet.
	"My dear, you wound me," said Emma theatrically.
	"Not yet, but it's an interesting challenge, don't you think?
They say every girl needs a hobby," Kitty replied evenly.
	"Dear, dear Kitty," Emma said airily.  "I remember when you
were just this high, and respected your elders."
	Kitty snorted derisively.  "Yeah, and -I- remember when Don's
Mom told you to put on some clothes."  There was a pause, and then
Kitty added in an impressed tone, "Wow.  I didn't know diamond could
blush."
	Emma looked like she might be coming close to unleashing a
thoroughly unladylike glare at the younger woman; then she controlled
herself - her diamond form's emotional limitations made that easier -
and surveyed herself with dismay.
	"Tsk.  Look at me, I'm a mess.  Smudged, sooty... thoroughly
besmirched."  She draped herself over Don's shoulder and murmured in
his ear (in a stage murmur, so everyone else would hear), "Donald,
darling, you wouldn't mind giving me a quick polish, would you?"
	"Miss -Frost-," said Paige, scandalized.  "Maybe you don't
realize it, seeing as you just got here, but Don and Kitty are
-married- now."
	Emma laughed lightly.  "Of course I realize it, Paige dear,"
she replied.  "It wouldn't be nearly as much fun teasing them if they
weren't."  She leaned to Don's ear again and added, "How about that
polish, darling?"
	Don looked resolutely down at the control board for a moment;
then he slowly raised his head, looking across the Time Rotor at
Kitty, and his face, though Emma couldn't see it, shifted from a
pained look into a rather evil smile.
	"Kitty," he said calmly, "would you pop down to the tool room
and get my belt sander?" he asked.  "You know I can't refuse a lady a
favor."
	Emma disengaged herself gingerly, stepped back, and reverted
to her human form.
	"On second thought," she said dismissively, "perhaps I'll just
take a bath."
	"Third door on the left," said Don, pointing without looking
away from Kitty.  "Mind the alligators."
	Gathering her dignity like a robe, Emma swept from the room.
	Don, Kitty, and Logan broke up snickering.
	"What is -her- problem?" Don wondered when he recovered
himself.
	"Well, she might have changed her stripes a little," said
Kitty, glancing at Paige for confirmation, "but we never were two of
her favorite people."
	"That's true," said Don, nodding thoughtfully.  "And -you- had
to bring up my -Mom-," he added cajolingly.
	"That was your mother's crowning moment," Kitty replied
staunchly.  "I never loved the woman more."  Then, becoming
solicitous, she asked, "How are you feeling?"
	"Surprisingly good," Don replied, taking stock of himself.
"My knee's a little stiff, and I'm going to be some sore in the
morning; and my head's still ringing from that last neuroshock... but
I think I'll be OK.  You?"
	"I'm fine," Kitty assured him.
	"Paige, I've got an automed that can probably help you more
with those burns," Don said.
	"I'm OK," Paige insisted.  "See, they're already healing."
And indeed they were, the blisters already beginning to recede, the
redness less angry-looking.
	"Listen," said Don softly, leaning closer to Kitty.  "Do you
think we can really trust - "  He jerked his head toward Nimrod X, who
was examining Paige's healing burns.
	Kitty nodded.  "I think so.  Remember where he was headed when
we locked him down?  I pulled out the override the Master Mold slapped
on him and completed that process.  I can't be -entirely- sure,
because I didn't have time to deconstruct his whole matrix, but... I
think he's for real."
	Don nodded.  "You're the computer expert," he said, smiling.
"Well, kids, I don't know about you, but your Uncle Don is dead tired
and feels like a truck ran over him, so he's going to bed now.  You
all know where the guest rooms are - er, well, except for you,
Nimrod... "
	Nimrod inclined his head graciously.  "Thank you, Dr. Griffin,
but that's not necessary.  I have a good deal of reorganization to do
in my data structures, and require only a quiet place in which to do
it.  A closet would do just as well as a bedroom for my purposes."
	"So," said Paige, "you've got a lot of thinking to do."
	"That's what I said," Nimrod confirmed.
	"C'mon, big guy," said Logan.  "I'll show you to the room next
to mine."

	The TARDIS crew retired.  Don went straight to bed, pausing
only to leave a note under the door of the Gothic bathroom telling
Emma how to get to a spare bedroom.  Logan did indeed show Nimrod to
the empty room next to the one he used when aboard, and got as his
reward the incongruous sight of the big mechanoid stretched out on
(and overflowing) the standard-size bunk, hands folded on chest.
Paige finished dressing her injuries and sacked out in the room she'd
used before, sleeping the sleep of the rather battered but, overall,
quite satisfied.
	Kitty took a shower in the much less elaborate res-block
bathroom, put on her bathrobe, and then made for a specific
destination through the dim and quiet corridors.
	On the way, she ran into Emma Frost, who was on her way back
from the Gothic bathroom looking scrubbed, swaddled, and smug.
	"Evening, Kitty," she said cordially.  "Prowling the halls,
are we?  A bit lacking in the connubial bliss department this
evening, perhaps?"
	"Piss off, Emma," Kitty growled, not even trying to be civil
any longer.
	"Well!" said Emma with raised eyebrows.  "I guess I've been
put in my place."  Tossing her blonde head, she went on down the hall,
calling behind her, "Ta, Katherine.  Pleasant dreams."
	"... cow," Kitty muttered, concentrating as hard as she could
on the mental image of a white heifer dressed in a few bits of white
leather and two pairs of elevator boots.
	"I saw that, Katherine!" Emma called without turning around or
slackening her pace.
	"moooo," Kitty grumbled, continuing on her way.  Note
to self, she thought: No longer automatically safe to leave Lens on
bedside table in TARDIS.
	Five minutes later, she was rummaging through one of the
endless racks of clothes in one of the TARDIS wardrobe rooms.  This
feature, provided so that TARDIS crews on the machines' intended
missions of temporal exploration would have proper attire for any
situation, had served Don and his friends well over the years,
supplying everything from emergency clothes to whole new costume
ideas.
	Now it was Kitty's only hope of finding something to help
restore her peace of mind, unsettled as it was by their "guest" in
white.
	"No... no... no... c'mon, you stupid thing, be in here...
everything ELSE is in here... " she muttered to herself as she
rampaged through the racks.
	Just as her hand closed on the item she was after, and the
satisfied "aha!" began collecting in her throat, a voice behind her
said,
	"You lookin' for something' in particular, darlin'?"
	"AaaAAaa!" Kitty cried, recoiling clean through the next rack
and then re-emerging with her prize still clutched in her hand.
"Logan!" she hissed.  Cripes, don't do that, you nearly gimme a heart
attack.  What are YOU doing in here?"
	"Lookin' for a new jacket," Logan replied calmly.  "My old
one's got tentacle marks on it."  He cocked his head, grinning, at the
sight of the object in Kitty's hand.  "That's a funny thing for a
master's candidate to be diggin' outta the closet," he observed.
	Kitty blushed bright red and stammered, "I, er... that is... "
	Logan's grin widened.  "Not that it's any o' -my- business,"
he continued.  He patted her on the shoulder.  "Have fun, darlin'," he
said.  Turning to keep looking through the rack on his side, he then
paused, turning back.
	"And don't worry, eh?" he said, nodding his head in the
general direction of the residence block.  "Boy's nowhere -near- dumb
enough to double-cross -you-."
	Kitty smiled.  She knew this man so well, so very well, that
she understood instantly: What he'd just said was Loganese for a long,
caring speech about strength of character, depth of commitment, and
trusting in those we love.
	She stood there for a few minutes after Logan moved away into
the forest of clothing racks, holding her prize in her hand, thinking.
	Yeah, he's right, she said to herself.  I've got nothing to
worry about.
	But, on the other hand... now that I've gone to all the
trouble of digging it out... 
	She slung her find over her shoulder and left the room,
whistling.

	Don wasn't asleep.  He was, rather, lying in bed, his hands
behind his head, looking up at the ceiling and thinking about the
events of the past couple of days.  About how good it was to see some
of the old gang again - more than he'd ever dared hope for.  About the
sad and shocking news he'd absorbed during his startling connection
with Jean.  About Jean herself.  About Nimrod, and the possibly
persisting threat of his "brother".
	About Paige and the promise she showed, and her dauntless
courage, so much like her brother's.  He'd never worked with her
before, but he was pleased to think of her as his friend, and now
they'd been blooded together - a thing which had considerable
significance in the odd, insular culture of the X-Men, even if it
wasn't always acknowledged.
	And about the strange new, same old, Emma Frost.  How very
-odd- she was... and yet... 
	There came a soft knock at the door - diffident, almost timid.
	Must be Paige, he thought, anyone else would either knock hard
or just barge right in.
	"Come in," he said.
	The door opened, and a slim, feminine figure entered, closing
it behind her.  It took Don's eyes a moment to readjust after the wash
of light from the corridor - the room was lit, but not brightly - and
for a second, he couldn't figure out who it was.
	Then his eyes widened in the dark as he realized it was Kitty.
	After his disappearance into the Interstitial Vortex during a
trans-temporal caper, when the rest of Excalibur had returned to their
home plane without him, Kitty had attempted to leave the hero game and
resume her interrupted education.  No university in Britain would take
her, despite her great brilliance, without a high school diploma, so a
friend had arranged for her to finish that diploma at an exclusive
school for girls in the north of England.
	Things had gotten very strange, Don understood, from that
point on; but he had sometimes teased Kitty about how sorry he was
that he'd missed the sight of her in her school uniform.  She had some
pictures, but it just wasn't the same.
	And there she stood, in a short-sleeved dress shirt with a
ribbon tie, a beige knit vest, a short tartan skirt with a series of
knife pleats, top-striped knee socks, and oxford shoes.  She didn't
look her age anyway - she was constantly being carded when she tried
to order beer with dinner - and she had her hair pulled back in a
ponytail that made her look younger still.
	Don swallowed.  Kitty stood there and looked nervous and
diffident - the very picture of an innocent and charming schoolgirl
forced by circumstance to bother a grumpy faculty member.
	"Uh... Professor Griffin?" she said in a soft, hesitant voice.
	"This is -not- fair," Don rasped, his mouth suddenly
desert-dry.
	"I was wondering... " Kitty continued, taking a couple of slow
steps toward the bed.
	"Stop.  I beg you, think of the children."
	"... if you're not too busy tomorrow after school... " she
said, coming closer, reaching down to place one warm hand against the
side of his face.
	"please," he whispered hopelessly.  "i'm a broken man.  don't
do this."
	Kitty leaned down, placed a gentle kiss on the middle of his
forehead, and then reached up and slowly pulled out the knot of her
ribbon tie as she whispered coquettishly in his ear,
	"... do you think you could help me with my math homework?"
	"... you did it," said Don with a groan, but he was smiling as
he reached up to pull her down into his arms.

  /*  Big Country  "Driving to Damascus"  _Driving to Damascus_  */

Eyrie Productions, Unlimited		I was driving to Damascus when a
presented				  sandstorm rose
UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT	The road disappeared and the axle froze
Lost and Found,				I was low on gas, lower on hope
or, A Time Lord's Holiday		I covered my eyes and I felt for
					  the rope
The Cast
(in order of appearance)		The wind was howling and the air
Paige Guthrie (Husk/Spitfire)		  it stung
Cain Marko (Juggernaut)			I breathed in dust and it burned
Professor Charles Xavier (Prof. X)	  my lungs
Erik Magnus Lehnsherr (Magneto)		And through the dust a driver came
Samuel Z. Guthrie (Cannonball)		Small and twisted and his face
Lucas Bishop				  was plain
Keiichi Morisato
Urd Snowmane				He said "Love them all
Belldandy Morisato			All that you need when your heart
Kitty Griffin (Shadowcat)		  is small
Donald E. Griffin			Love them all
Logan (Wolverine)			You're gonna find them when they fall"
Jubilation Lee (Jubilee)
Henry McCoy, Ph.D. (Beast)		It was not hard to make him out
Stephen Crawford			He simply spoke while I had to shout
Gert Freitag				He asked me "Where you driving child?"
Jean Grey (Phoenix)			His voice was clear but his eyes
Bobby Drake (Iceman)			  were wild
Rahne Sinclair (Wolfsbane)
Kerit Dagris				I said "I'm going to the city
Nellis Ells				To meet the high and proud
Natalie Ells				And let them know that anger
Marton Dane				Is the nature of the crowd"
Kelson Berg
Elar Markat				He said "Love them all
Ororo Munroe (Storm)			All that you need when your heart
Tommy Two-Stepper			  is small
Packet					Love them all
Justinian Lynch				You're gonna find them when they fall"
Phoebe Thermopeles
Lockheed				Love them all
Lorelei Tucker				All that you need when your heart
Nelson Harris, MD			  is small
Jane Solo				Love them all
Jason Solo				You're gonna find them when they fall
Johan Spandler				
Rokk Krinn				He said "Your words are lost on the
Ayla Ranzz				  dead
Benjamin D. Hutchins			When you belong to them
Mace Windu				Once I was dead and I knew the words
Luornu Durgo				Of those dry and hollow men"
Marya Telluris				Then he took the rope and he hitched
The Hon. Horatio Taverner		  me up
The Hon. Elvis Barrymore		Freed me from the dust
John Krychuk				And he helped me round the pilgrims up
Fritz Baumer				And lead them to the bus
Emma Frost (White Queen)		
Orion					Love them all
Nimrod X				All that you need when your heart
					  is small
Lord President				Love them all
Benjamin D. Hutchins			You're gonna find them when they fall
					
Travel Agent/Thermopeles created by	Love them all
Kris Overstreet				All that you need when your heart
					  is small
Cerebro Repair Technician		Love them all
Kelly St. Clair				You're gonna find them when they fall
					
Squiddie Wrangling			Love them all
The Usual Suspects			All that you need when your heart
					  is small
"Killiecrankie" by Robert Burns		Love them all

	       You're gonna find them when they fall...


Well, here we are again, and I suppose it's time for some more
explanation.

On second thought, the heck with it - this piece pretty well explains
itself.  It's unfinished business, pure and simple, a little more
picking and choosing, a little more mining the nuggets out of the old
(and not so old) Marvel Universe.  In it, I've played the one hook I
had left for doing so.  Thus, barring flashback stories into Don's
early career, this is the last time you'll see the MU; and unless I
come up with a -really- good reason for it, it's the last time you'll
see anyone crossing the divide between these two worlds.  Well...
ALMOST the last time.  There's a piece missing from "Lost & Found"...
but we'll get to that soon enough.

Will you be seeing any of the new characters introduced here again?

Oh, hell, yes.

Like I said on the Forum when I posted the teaser, in response to the
question "is this a one-shot, or the start of something big?" - a
little of both.

--G.
The Hedges, Millinocket, ME
06/30/2K3


			the X-Men will return

			 E P U (colour) 2003